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MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 




THE GERMAN EMPEROR, WILHELM II, AND THE EMPRESS 
AUGUSTA VICTORIA 



MEMORIES OF THE 
FATHERLAND 



BY 



ANNE TOPHAM 

AUTHOR OF "MEMORIES OF THE KAISER'S COURT' 



WITH TWELVE ILLUSTRATIONS 



NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 

1916 




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CONTENTS 



CHAP. 
I. 

II. 

III. 



5 s - 



v. 



VI. 



Go 



VII. 
VIII. 



CW ix 



X. 

XI. 

XII. 

XIII. 

XIV. 

XV. 



Introductory 

First Impressions 

German Militarism 

The German Soldier 

The German Officer 

German Education 

German Womanhood 

The Prussian Court 

The Kaiser 

Frederick the Great and his Father 

Berlin and Potsdam . 

Gardens and Zeppelins 

The Navy and Table-Talk 

British Blunders 

Conclusion 

Index 



PAGE 
I 

18 

3i 

47 

63 

83 

105 

127 

148 

171 

196 

219 

244 

261 

282 

297 



r 

> 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

The Kaiser and Kaiserin .... Frontispiece 
Photo, Selle, Kuntze, & Niederastroth, Potsdam 

FACING PAGE 

Princess Victoria Louise . . . . -32 

Photo, Forster, Brunswick 

Prince Joachim ....... 60 

Photo, Selle, Kuntze, & Niederastroth, Potsdam 

The Crown Prince . . . . . 74 

Photo, Berger, Potsdam 

The Emperor waiting at Potsdam for the First 

Parseval Airship ...... 100 

Photo, Anne Topham 

Prince Adalbert . . . . . .128 

Photo, F. Urbahns, Kiel 

The Kaiser and Prince August Wilhelm . .150 



The Kaiser at Garitza 

Photo, Th. Jurgensen, Kiel 

Prince Eitel Friedrich 

Prince August Wilhelm 

Photo, Selle, Kuntze, & Niederastroth 

The Kaiser and Count Zeppelin . 

Prince Oscar .... 

Photo, E. Sellin, Berlin 



Potsdam 



174 

214 
226 

240 
274 



MEMORIES 
OF THE FATHERLAND 

CHAPTER I 
INTRODUCTORY 

OF all the memories of Germany and the Ger- 
mans that linger in my mind, although those 
connected with the Prussian Court, where I 
spent seven interesting and not unhappy years assisting 
in the education of the Emperor's daughter, naturally 
emerge with the greatest prominence and frequency 
from the background of the past, yet there are many 
other recollections of certain phases of German life, 
experiences met with away from the somewhat stilted 
and wearisome atmosphere of the Court, the memory 
of which returns to me in the light of recent tragic events 
with a renewed and stimulated interest. The German 
nation and the policy that guides its destinies have 
recently been put to the test, while the psychology of 
its people has been analysed and explained as surely the 
soul of no race in the records of history has ever before 
been analysed and explained. The searchlight of a 
i 



2 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

virulent criticism applied to the dissection of that subtle 
thing, a national personality, is bound to throw into 
somewhat lurid and exaggerated relief certain traits 
of national character, to invest well-known personalities 
with a new and sinister significance. 

The German nation is a nation of tremendous co- 
hesion, hammered and welded into homogeneity by 
methods which do not commend themselves to our 
English minds, which have been developed in an 
atmosphere of purer freedom, of more individualistic 
tendencies ; but it is difficult for the ordinary Englishman 
— I will not say untravelled Englishman, for those who 
have travelled in Germany without being able to speak 
the language and in consequence to mix with the people, 
are almost as remote from understanding the German 
spirit as those who have never been there — it is, I say, 
extremely difficult for the ordinary Englishman, whose 
experiences have not enabled him to gain an insight into 
anything but the mere outward and visible expressions 
of German methods, to realize the difference in point 
of view between German and English ideals. Beyond 
chronicling certain experiences this book makes little 
attempt to interpret the German national consciousness, 
a very complex and in some respects astonishingly 
contradictory spirit, rising to wonderful heights of sub- 
limity, merging into the most nauseous sentimentality ; 
often inspired by self-interest, yet anxious to convince 
itself of the purity of its motives, and always preserving 
a sense of being a part of a great whole whose culminating 



INTRODUCTORY 3 

splendour is personified in the person of the Emperor, 
deified by his people to an extent incredible to English 
minds. 

The picture of Germany as it appeared before the 
war to those of us who have lived there, has been one on 
which we have fixed our gaze with a desperate hope 
that after all it was not a travesty of the real thing, that 
the German people were, as we had believed, a simple- 
hearted, kindly, industrious, and highly cultivated 
people, living up to the same standard of honour as 
ourselves, and inspired by those ideals which make a 
nation great ; but day by day the outlines of this picture 
have become blurred by the horrors and agonies of a 
warfare of such ruthless type as the modern world has 
never known. To those of us who knew Germany fairly 
well, who have lived on terms of intimacy with her 
people, the seeming inconsistency in her conduct, the 
music and poetry, the sentiment and idealism which 
seem so incongruously allied with an overbearing brut- 
ality and diseased egoism, are nevertheless in the nature 
of an easily accepted and understood attitude of mind. 
We can see and explain to ourselves some of the reasons 
that have made the German people what they are ; we 
know that they are docile and easily led, of somewhat 
plastic and childlike mind, a mind liking to keep company 
with other minds, kept carefully pruned and only allowed 
to shoot forth in government ally approved directions. 
We know that they are a people passionately trained 
from childhood to believe in the divine destiny of the 



4 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

German race, that their patriotism is as their religion, 
blind maybe and fanatical, but followed with a faithful 
sense of the duty and necessity of self-sacrifice, of whole- 
hearted self-abnegation, a people that take a certain 
pride in their lack of refinement, which they regard as 
verging perilously on effeminacy. They have an intense 
and inherited hatred for French politeness and subtle 
wit, and prefer a blunt coarseness, a rather broad form of 
humour, because in it they see the virility and down- 
right honesty which they imagine to be a purely Teuton 
characteristic. 

Before the horror of the Present entirely obliterates 
the happier memories of bygone times, out of the wreck 
and welter of dissolving friendships and shattered 
illusions, one puts forth a timid hand, striving to save 
some broken fragment, to preserve from complete 
obliteration in the turbid flood of events some shadowy 
recollection of a saner, happier time, when Germany 
was at peace and all seemed well with the world. 

Of the German Emperor's Court and the childhood 
of his daughter the writer in a former book has already 
given some glimpses to the outside world. That first 
chronicle of memories was chiefly a record of a child's 
life, of a child who, though born in the purple, at a time 
when her father had for some years been enjoying the 
Imperial dignity, found her chief happiness, as all 
children do, in the small brief happenings of existence, 
in the unimportant everyday things that are essentially 
alike in palaces and in the humblest homes. 



INTRODUCTORY 5 

A short time after the marriage and departure of 
that sunny presence from her father's Court, the dark 
clouds that had been threatening so long suddenly 
descended and the storm burst. 

" I was born on a Friday and on the thirteenth 
of the month," laughingly remarked the Emperor's 
daughter on the eve of her wedding, " but my luck 
hasn't been so very bad, has it ? " and she looked as though 
she would continue to defy Fate and the omens ; but 
even at that time, when she was so happy, the shadow 
of war had already been haunting her consciousness 
and troubling the serenity of her dream of love. 

" The poor child did nothing but cry after she was 
engaged," said the Empress a few days after her 
daughter's wedding. " She was always imagining that 
war would break out — extraordinary, wasn't it ? Always 
thinking that Prince Ernst August would have to go 
away and fight and they would never meet again. She 
was continually crying when he was away, and grew so 
thin and miserable — always fretting and unhappy." 

The Empress smiled indulgently and pityingly at 
her daughter's folly, while some of the ladies of the Court 
commented on the peculiar obsession of the Princess. 
They also told how one of the Empress's suite, anxious 
to encourage the disconsolate fiancee, had jokingly 
assured her that even if war did break out in the Balkans 
she would have no reason for special uneasiness. 

" It will be a campaign of just six weeks or so, and 
princes are always sent to the front packed in cotton 



6 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

wool, and are only unpacked when they get home again," 
said the old gentleman, treating her fears lightly. The 
Princess laughed but continued to be anxious. She 
had a surer instinct than those around her. She knew 
that the ladies and gentlemen of the Court were often 
curiously ignorant of the political eddies that flowed 
and ebbed around them. They were so accustomed 
to wild rumours. They had heard them so often. They 
were sure that trouble would be avoided by tactful 
diplomacy. They ignored the possibility of the tactful 
diplomat not being forthcoming, that some time the 
reins might be in the hands of a well-meaning blunderer, 
incapable of dealing with a difficult situation. 

Few people who in recent years have visited Germany 
will be ready to deny that their first impressions of the 
Empire and its people were very pleasant ones. 

The beautiful forests, lakes, and mountains of its 
southern regions compared favourably with any other 
scenery in the world, and in the country districts the 
simple, homely, industrious life of the people made an 
immediate and irresistible appeal. One felt at once 
attracted to those strong-looking sturdy brown peasant- 
women who might be seen everywhere, working from 
dawn till dusk in the fields throughout the summer 
months, turning smiling friendly faces to the stranger 
who happened to pass, always with a ready word of 
greeting. Even though they wore no shoes or stockings, 
though their clothes were faded and plain, they radiated 
an air of neatness, of rude health, of a poverty which 



INTRODUCTORY 7 

was self-respecting and not unduly self-conscious. One 
wished that all poverty were as dignified, as cheerful, 
and as picturesque. 

It might be that our encounters with the smaller 
official class may have caused us to yearn for the con- 
siderate urbanity that characterizes policemen and 
porters in England, and our dealings with an employe 
of the German customs department, left in an inex- 
plicably violent state of irritation by the delinquencies 
of the owner of the trunks which had been examined 
before ours, might have made us wonder why our 
innocent effects should be offered up as a sacrifice to a 
very human but unofficial fit of temper, why the callous 
hand of the purple-faced Zollner, irritated, as one plainly 
perceived, to that explosive point which seems so easily 
reached by foreign officials, should devastate our 
cherished and undutiable belongings in a search for 
things which he must have known were not there. Why 
did he accuse our obviously last year's, recently-cleaned 
blouses of being new, forcing us to reveal in public the 
small holes and worn places, the existence of which we 
had shrunk from admitting even to ourselves ? 

Yet apart from some small vexations which led us 
to believe that a certain type of German was specially 
trained — as people train dogs to be savage by goading 
and ill-treating them — to keep all his most disagreeable 
qualities uppermost for the benefit of the public, our 
first impressions of Germany and its people were dis- 
tinctly pleasant. 



8 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

The doings of Das Volk — the people — were, as else- 
where, of intense and continual interest. Higher in the 
scale of entertainment than any amount of picture 
galleries, museums, churches, ruins, or other distractions 
thrust on the tourist, is the life of the working-class 
— their diversions, their tastes, their dress, their ideas. 
The existence of the mass of the people, untouched by 
foreign customs, is always the most individual, the most 
characteristically national. 

One never grew tired of watching, on warm, sunny 
Sunday afternoons, the endless procession of men, 
women, and children — such an astonishing quantity of 
children — moving in a solid perspiring mass, with, on 
the part of the older people, that solemn, serious air, 
as of participants in a ceremonial function, towards 
the various Garten-Restaurants, where, for an iminites- 
imally small sum, they might indulge in beer and coffee, 
and would eat the honey-cakes and Butter-Brodchen that 
the frugal Haus-Frau had brought with her from home, 
carried in a green plush bag with " Guten-Appetit " 
worked across it in Gothic letters from corner to corner. 
Sometimes they would buy picture-post-cards for one 
Pfennig — the tenth part of a penny — and each inscribe 
some affectionate greeting to the soldier son of the family 
doing his military service in some distant garrison town. 

Close to the restaurant, under the wide-spreading 
lime-trees planted in the light, sandy soil, at the edge of 
the forest, that ubiquitous delightful forest which adds 
so much to the charm of the country, hundreds of 



INTRODUCTORY 9 

green-painted iron tables and chairs, as well as wooden 
benches with legs fixed into the ground, were placed. 
And at every table, flooded with the warm sunshine, 
in that still, golden mellow summer air of the Continent 
which we hardly know in our cooler islands, family 
groups sat enjoying themselves in the decent, quiet, 
respectable, orderly German way, drinking their coffee, 
munching Pfanne-Kuchen, sniffing the warm, resinous 
odour of the pine-trees. 

Waiters in somewhat crushed-looking shirts and 
conventional if rather rusty evening suits hurried 
breathlessly from table to table, taking orders, per- 
forming feats of dexterity with trays and plates, bringing 
toothpicks and cigars, or chess-boards for those superior 
spirits who, completely detached from the subdued 
turmoil around them, could immerse themselves in the 
problems of the game. 

When the summer darkness fell, bringing only a 
relative coolness, for the air still remained warm and 
enveloping, lights began to twinkle among the trees, 
beads of tiny lanterns strung on wire threads ran from 
branch to branch, and, under the far-away stars, to the 
accompaniment of the gentle rustling of the pine-branches 
in the dark depths of the forest, the eating and drinking 
still went merrily on. 

Nature and restaurants are invariably associated 
in the German mind, and a passionate enthusiasm for 
food is combined with an equally intense admiration of 
scenery. 



io MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

As soon as a beauty spot is discovered, it is improved 
by cutting down trees if necessary, convenient paths are 
constructed converging to it, dangerous corners fenced off, 
finger-posts erected telling the travellers of the beautiful 
view to be seen a little higher up, seats are carefully 
arranged where he can sit and soak into his soul what- 
ever it is capable of assimilating, and as he turns away, 
satiated perhaps with the wonders of atmosphere and 
scenery, unobtrusively, tactfully, but none the less 
inevitably, nailed perhaps to the stem of a straight, 
upstanding pine-tree, appears before his absorbed 
consciousness the wooden tablet bearing the suggestive 
word " Erfrischung " or " Restaur ation " with a rudely 
painted hand indicating the direction where the said 
refreshment and restoration may be found. 

The W aid-Restaurant will be hidden in a nest of 
verdure and consist chiefly of Wald and green-painted 
chairs and tables, but will be none the less ready to 
minister every Sunday to the wants of an astonishing 
number of hungry and thirsty admirers of Nature. 

" Prose and Poetry," sighed a German friend to me 
once as he drew back the chair from the table we had 
selected for our Abend-Essen, and he nodded in the 
direction of a lady on our right who was devouring 
Kalb-Schnitzel mit Bohnen with the whole-hearted energy 
and obvious enjoyment characteristic of her nation. 
Then he turned to the left where, above the purple peak 
of a hill outlined against a sky suffused with dying 
scarlet, a star glittered in lonely beauty. 



INTRODUCTORY n 

" The Ideal and the Real," he continued as he took 
his seat, " always they torture us with their incongruity 
— a continual jarring — why must people eat ? It is 
really a stupid, insesthetic arrangement. The world 
would be so much more beautiful if we did not need 
to be continually replenishing our bodies with greasy 
meat and vegetables — pieces of dead cattle " — and he 
looked with disgust at the Kalb- Schnitzel. 

" But," I objected timidly, " somewhere I have read 
that Hunger is the great motive power of the world — 
it is what drives all the mills and steam-engines and 
builds the bridges and railways. Nobody would work 
if they never were hungry, there would be no stimulus, 
no urgent need " 

He began to look bored, so I stopped talking, and he 
then ordered a large and succulent supper, not at all of 
a vegetarian nature, enjoying it thoroughly, and never, 
until he had quite finished, allowing his gaze to wander 
to the scenery. He then lit a large and rank-smelling 
cigar and became unduly sentimental, breaking into 
snatches of song and poetic apostrophes to the moon, 
whose thin sickle had swung into view from behind the 
pine-tops. 

If there happened to be a Gesang-Verein — a 
choral society — out for a jaunt, it was certain that the 
depths of the silent woods would dissolve into sudden 
and frequent harmony, and the velvety darkness be 
pierced by tuneful voices trolling forth one of those 
quaint simple German Volks-Lieder which were created 



12 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

to be sung in the open air out under the stars among 
the perfumes of field and forest. And the stranger in 
the land, hearing and seeing these things for the first 
time, — the songs in the twilight, the outdoor life of 
sunshine and forest, — believed that this was the real 
Germany, the Germany which appeared to be unconscious 
of the necessity of a naval policy or Welt-Politik, which 
obviously seemed to prefer its present on the sunny, 
fruitful soil of the Fatherland to any potential future on 
the water. The simplicity, the sober mirth, and kindli- 
ness appeared to be a fundamental part of the national 
temperament, and the English traveller felt his pre- 
judices melting, and, as his knowledge of the outer 
national life increased, his respect increased with it. 

Later on he may perhaps have found himself not 
quite certain if all was as well as it appeared to be : he 
might have wondered if the benevolent despotism of 
German rule was good or bad for people ; if it was better 
to have everything arranged without worrying about 
the wishes or opinions of the people arranged for ; if it 
was good to be well governed without popular consent, 
or less well governed with it. In Germany politics seem 
to be so remote from the ordinary life of the people 
it is hardly worth while to discuss them, they interest 
only a few. Before an election there are no campaigns 
of heated and incoherent speeches ; no one gets excited 
about it ; no one writes letters to the papers. One is 
spared, not only the clash and clamour of opposing forces 
which echo in the correspondence columns of our own 



INTRODUCTORY 13 

English papers, but also the ventilation of the private 
opinions and experiences of Mr. Nobody, who with us 
is encouraged to write, often astonishingly illuminating 
letters, for the instruction of his fellow-citizens. In 
Germany the people are divided into two great sections, 
those who do as they are told and those who tell them, 
and if it were not for the Social Democrats, who keep 
things from getting tame and stagnant, and preserve 
an attitude of discontent which is perhaps more divine 
in its origin than the monarchical privileges inherited 
by the rulers of modern Germany, German politics would 
appear to be almost non-existent. As a nation the 
people are wonderfully docile, and accept with a kind of 
resigned patience much that they find personally ob- 
jectionable. They know that they are a splendidly 
organized people, that in spite of themselves they have 
been welded into something massive and coherent, and 
they certainly have no desire to change their own form 
of government for anything more nearly approaching 
the English system. The great middle class have 
infinite faith in their rulers : they prefer to be spared the 
necessity of deciding matters of high policy, for which 
their training and experience have not fitted them ; they 
like to be masters of detail, and to leave the big design to 
experts ; they have been content to know that Germany 
has been increasing wonderfully in wealth and power and 
prestige during the last thirty years ; they believe her 
invincible ; they cannot imagine a form of government 
superior to the one they possess ; they are passionately 



14 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

inspired by a feeling of personal devotion and service to 
their Emperor, and are trained to an inspired patriotism 
whose chief note is self-sacrifice and blind obedience. 

I once knew an elderly English gentleman, one of 
those pleasant people who always try to see the rosy 
side of things and find extenuating circumstances in 
even the worst of crimes. He had lost a good deal of 
money by persistently believing that the prospectuses 
issued by company-promoters were to be accepted as a 
fair and unprejudiced statement ; the golden optimism 
radiating from them warmed his heart and fired his 
imagination. He was a dear unsophisticated person, 
and lived a life of illusion. Fortunately, his own personal 
habits were of the simplest, so that he hardly missed the 
money he lost, and the special Providence that dedicates 
itself to the service of such as he, often interfered and 
saved him from his worst indiscretions. He once spent 
six weeks with his son in wandering about pleasant 
bypaths of the Fatherland, remote primitive places in 
the Black Forest, where he noted for the first time the 
many pleasant aspects of German existence. Since that 
time until his death a month before the Great War 
broke out, he steadily refused to believe in German 
militarism, and assured every one who discussed the 
subject with him that it did not exist. Nowhere had 
he seen a German uniform, and all the Germans he met 
had been obviously absorbed in quite peaceful occupa- 
tions, tilling the soil, keeping hotels and restaurants, 
travelling as tourists ; they talked amiably with him 



INTRODUCTORY 15 

in his own tongue, continually quoted Shakespeare, 
paid him various kind little attentions dear to the heart of 
an elderly gentleman, and he returned home to England 
almost convinced that the German Navy had no material 
existence, but was a fevered dream of certain excitable 
English politicians. 

I have met a good many English men and women of 
that type in Germany, so determined to divest their 
minds of preconceived dislikes, so anxious not to be 
insular, but to give even the hated foreigner his due, 
that they have run to the opposite extreme, and enjoying, 
unconsciously to themselves, the mere differences of 
national custom as though they were something infinitely 
to the credit of the Germans, they accepted all the 
pleasures, the undiluted sunshine, the outdoor existence 
of Garten-Restaurants, the not entirely disinterested 
amiability of hotel-keepers and waiters, as proofs of 
some innate superiority in German social life. 

They considered it a sign of national industry that 
so many women might be seen working in the fields, 
ignoring those that worked at unloading bricks and in 
factories ; they confused that personal sense of interest 
and well-being which most travellers enjoy, with some- 
thing inherently attractive in the German atmosphere. 
They believed that they had been totally misled in 
their estimate of the nation, and when they returned 
home set themselves to persuade other people that the 
Germans were a peaceful race of infinite charm who 
were woefully misjudged in England. 



16 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

The cultivated German can be very charming, and 
still more the cultivated German woman, but it is per- 
haps only when one differs in opinion with any foreigner 
that a real glimpse of his character is to be discovered. 
When all the pleasant urbanity takes to itself wings 
and flies away, leaving an angry, fretful person who 
with the unself consciousness of a child exhibits his own 
feelings in waves of self -revelation, then comes an 
opportunity to look into the man's real soul. If he is 
petty-minded, he will be petty and ignoble in his anger ; 
if he is broad-minded and tolerant, even his rage will 
show itself as something not unworthy of a finely con- 
structed mental fabric. The German is easily moved 
to irritability and even wrath. He whips himself 
consciously into anger, and is prodigal of ridiculous and 
mirth-provoking gesticulations as evidence of the 
strength of his emotions. He possesses little self-control, 
though he talks a great deal about it. "Man muss 
sich selbst beherrschen" shrieks the German schoomaster, 
and then he clenches his fist and with prodigal arm- 
wavings raves at his pupil for some small breach of 
regulations. The Englishman, as a rule, when he feels 
himself beginning to get angry, grows rather quiet and 
polite ; but the German, on the contrary, from the first 
moment of conscious outrage disguises his feelings 
neither to himself nor others. I am not sure that he 
would not consider it almost hypocritical to do so, and 
in any case he has never been brought up to believe that 
it is disgraceful in a grown-up man to exhibit an easily- 



INTRODUCTORY 17 

fretted and childish anger. It is in moments such as 
these that the national temperament seems to reveal 
itself, and we see the fundamental differences that 
eternally divide the British and the Teutonic mind. 

It has been made a reproach to English people that 
they do not understand German ideals and the German 
attitude of mind, but still fewer English people appear 
capable of understanding the British attitude of mind, 
of appreciating the tremendous gulf that separates the 
English mentality from that of Continental nations. 
We do not ourselves grasp what England and English 
ideas of liberty have done for us and for the world, and 
it is only when we get away from our own shores, when 
we live in countries where we find other than English 
methods and ideas prevailing, that we begin to have an 
insight into all that England stands for in the world's 
history, to realize that when Wordsworth called our 
country " a bulwark of the cause of men " he was not 
indulging in mere poetic licence, but enunciating a very 
vital and significant truth. 



CHAPTER II 
FIRST IMPRESSIONS 

MY first visit to Germany took place some 
twenty years ago, when with a friend I made 
a three weeks' tour in, the Rhine district. 
That portion of the German nation which then came 
within my limited sphere of observation consisted 
chiefly of perspiring waiters talking English of a peculiarly 
ingenious and unusual quality, and the stout, bland, 
polite gentlemen in immaculate morning dress who 
appeared to live, move, and have their being day and 
night on the top step of the hotel, where they were 
continually engaged in welcoming the arriving or speeding 
the departing guests. 

" Gluckliche Reise, mein Herr. Gluckliche Reise, meine 
Dame." No one was allowed to depart — and scores of 
hotel guests departed daily — without this benediction 
from the Wirt. 

The hotel where we stayed was one of those quaint 
old-fashioned houses built round a central courtyard, 
much patronized by the Germans themselves, and there- 
fore more interesting to live in than the palatial 
" Victoria," " Windsor," and " Britannia " directly on 

18 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 19 

the river front, which were so crowded with Americans 
and English that one might almost as well have been 
in London or New York. 

The bedrooms were distinctly German bedrooms, 
pervaded by a rough cleanliness. The floors were 
painted the colour of French mustard, and there was no 
dressing-table in the English sense of the word, as the 
marble-topped washstand with its large mirror hung 
above it was expected to do duty for both. 

" Have you noticed," said my friend, after we had 
been travelling a week, " that nobody — I mean none 
of the women — ' do ' their hair in Germany ? And 
some of the younger girls have such beautiful hair, but 
they just twist it up anyhow into a hard knob, and if 
their hair curls naturally it seems to almost distress 
them — they remind me of colts going to the fair, with 
their manes plaited up as tightly as possible. Even 
the tiniest children have little pigtails, instead of nice 
curls." 

" German cleanliness, German economy, German 
simplicity, German absence of vanity, German 
Tiichtigkeit," I murmured, quoting the Fraulein at whose 
feet we had both sat to imbibe a knowledge of the 
German language and literature. 

" No, I don't think it's anything of the kind. The 
real reason is that ; " and she pointed to the combined 
dressing - table - washstand. " You see, here they've 
given us an expensive high-backed green plush sofa in 
our room, with three funny little square antimacassar- 



20 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

things pinned on it for us to rest our heads on, and also 
a nice round table to write on, and a fine big mahogany 
hanging cupboard for all the clothes we might have 
brought with us but didn't — and yet they take for 
granted that a woman can do herself justice with the 
only looking-glass placed flat against the wall in the 
darkest corner opposite to the light. I feel sorry for 
German women. They haven't a chance. I'm not 
surprised that they give up trying. They never can 
have a proper idea of what they look like. Yet," she 
reflected, in the monologue characteristic of her con- 
versation, " they can see each other — one would think 
that would help ; but after all " — with an attempt at 
impartial judgment — " they are not perhaps really worse 
than the weird specimens of English we keep meeting. 
I wonder why people travelling are always funnier to 
look at and more ill-mannered than people not travelling ? 
I never knew what awful specimens my native isles could 
produce until I met them on the Continent. Why, 
divorced from his background, does the Englishman, 
and still more the Englishwoman, produce a feeling of 
irritation in the observer ? " 

" I don't know," I interposed ; " but they certainly 
don't get as excited and screaming as the German 
traveller, and brutally bump every person in the corridor 
with Hand-Gepack while they utter polite phrases." 

We had suffered terrible things from other people's 
Hand-Gepack, which looms so largely in Continental 
travel, and although before leaving England we had 



|FIRST IMPRESSIONS 21 

determined to remorselessly strip ourselves of every 
atom of " insular prejudice," of which we were largely 
conscious ; though we resolved to approach differences 
in national custom with the tolerant scientific mind, 
which has no room for love or hate or personal bias ; to 
study and search after the ultimate purpose of all the 
activities to be seen at work around us ; yet we never 
afterwards saw reason to modify that first decision of 
ours that the comfort of the German railway system 
was absolutely destroyed by the presence of the enormous 
quantities of hand-luggage under which every frugal- 
minded traveller staggers. 

In Germany there is no such thing as driving up to 
the station a minute before the train starts and having 
your hastily-labelled boxes thrust by an alert and 
lavishly-tipped porter into the van as it begins to move 
along the platform. Unsophisticated English travellers 
are long before they realize the necessity of bringing their 
heavy luggage to the Bahn-Hof at least an hour before 
the departure of the train. I remember an Englishman, 
travelling for the first time with his wife on the Continent, 
who was with great difficulty and much urging by others 
induced to take his small trunk (just too heavy to be 
considered Hand-Gepdck) to the station half an hour 
before the train started for Holland. 

" I can register that in five minutes," he kept pro- 
testing. But when he arrived in a cab with his wife 
and saw the long, long queue of people waiting, each 
with an attendant porter and luggage on a barrow, 



22 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

while two bearded individuals with grave and aggravating 
deliberation weighed each load and made out Gepack- 
Scheine, as though Time and the perspiring public were 
their slaves, he began to regret that he had not come 
sooner. 

" This is a rotten system," he was heard to murmur 
fretfully, as the minutes continued to fade into the past ; 
and his wife, anxiously regarding the hardly diminished 
line, tried to comfort him with the thought that these 
people were probably also going by the same train as 
they themselves, but as a matter of fact they were all 
travelling in other directions and had several hours to 
spare. 

The Englishman missed his train and had to wait 
four hours for another, which brought him and his wife 
to their destination at uncomfortable chilly small hours, 
and his previous conviction that " things are managed 
so much better over here " — that is, on the Continent — 
received a rude jolt. As neither he nor his wife spoke 
any language but their own, he resolved in future always 
to join a " personally conducted party," one of those 
unhappy groups of tourists of which one catches glimpses 
in picture galleries, on the steps of St. Peter's, shepherded 
sourly by an arrogant guide, who explains to them 
superciliously and erroneously as much of local history 
as he thinks good for them to hear, and pilots them, 
what time they think they are on their way to inspect 
a celebrated ruin, to a jeweller's shop where they are 
beguiled into buying hat-pins for their lady friends at 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 23 

twice the price that they would cost if bought in 
London. 

German stations strike English people by their size, 
their lightness, their airiness and, the more recently 
built, by their architectural beauty, also by their enor- 
mous restaurants crowded with people who sit eating 
and drinking in strange and curious ways. Ladies, in 
rather short skirts, obviously equipped for travel, with 
Reise-Taschen slung round their shoulders and a Baedeker 
peeping out of their pockets, sit imbibing from tall glass 
tankards pale-brown Miinchener-Bier and eating Belegtes 
Butter-Brodchen — good-sized rolls of the shape and colour 
of a tea-cake, split in two, buttered on one side only, 
and containing slices of ham, beef, or Wurst. The 
Belegtes Butter-Brodchen is typically German. It is 
eaten by every class of society from Royalty downwards, 
and is always produced on every railway journey, and 
partaken of while held firmly in both hands, with the 
meat hanging out at one corner. It has a robust, satisfy- 
ing appearance, and a German friend told me that she 
could travel for a day and a night without any other 
support than three Butter-Brodchen, especially if they were 
belegt with raw smoked ham, which gives an English person 
shivers when eating it for the first time. 

The manners of people, not only in matters of food 
and drink but in their disposal of the same, are of con- 
tinual interest. The Germans take a passionate interest 
in their food; they frankly enjoy eating and drinking, 
and encourage their children to do the same. They 



24 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

think it no shame to display an eager appetite, and their 
table manners are certainly not so strictly controlled as 
those of other nations. 

I once sat at table with a small girl of eight years of 
age, a daughter of one of the noblest families of the 
Fatherland, who — at a party, too — as she lay back in her 
chair calmly expelled the stones of the grapes she was 
eating in the least troublesome manner to herself, careless 
as to where they might fall. Projected in a continuous 
shower from her rosebud mouth, they speckled the table- 
cloth all round her plate, occasionally falling into her 
own or somebody else's lap ; but nobody took any notice. 
They did not seem to think it was a matter to trouble 
over. Yet the German child is otherwise invariably 
well brought up, and treats its elders with a respect un- 
known in America and England. Little girls are taught 
to make Knixes, those neat little curtsies that one reads 
about in books of bygone days ; they kiss the ringers of 
nice old-lady visitors ; and the little boys will come and 
shake hands morning and evening, and very often, for 
no immediately apparent reason, during the day. They 
are not spoilt and over-indulged, nor allowed to develop 
on lines of their own choosing, but are early trained to 
either mental or physical hard work, and on the whole 
appear to enjoy life just as intensely as other children 
the world over. 

Native-born Germans who have never been outside 
their own country, and many who have, take a certain 
pride in keeping to what they call their " echt AU-Deut- 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 25 

scher Sitten," — good old German customs, — so they hold 
the fork upright in the left fist like a dagger while they 
cut up their meat, tuck their napkins inside their collars, 
dip their rolls and plum-cake into their morning coffee, 
with a pleasant consciousness of being left untouched 
by the insidious refinements of English and American 
civilization. 

While Dernburg was Colonial Minister, a post he held 
for a very short time, he was once invited to the New 
Palace to dine with the Emperor, and the aristocratic 
Prussian officers, who resented his presence at the Royal 
table, spread abroad an unkind and I believe apocryphal 
story to the effect that on sitting down to table he was 
about to use his napkin in the familiar restaurant manner, 
girding it round his ample chest and putting it up to his 
chin, when the Emperor interposed with the remark, 
"Dernburg, Hier wird man nicht rasiert" — "We don't 
shave people here." 

It is a quite improbable tale, but none the less had a 
great vogue in Berlin, being whispered maliciously every- 
where by Dernburg's many enemies among the titled 
bureaucracy. 

It was a journey on a Rhine steamer, taken in lovely 
sunny weather, which gave me my first glimpse into 
German life. The scenery of the Rhine is in some parts 
extremely picturesque, but very few of the passengers 
appeared to have any time to look at it. The livelong 
day they were joyously occupied in eating, and filled up 
the intervals by drinking some of the various cheap 



26 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

wines of the district. The steamer was obviously just a 
floating restaurant, in every particular like the extra- 
ordinarily well-managed ones on shore. The passengers 
occasionally interrupted their meals to stand up and 
wave enthusiastic pocket-handkerchiefs to people in 
other steamers going in an opposite direction, who 
responded with that hearty and determined lavishness of 
enjoyment which strikes one as so kind and friendly in 
people who are perfect strangers to each other. 

I was told by an agreeably informative German lady 
that it is considered a sign of deplorable ignorance and 
a grave omission of common courtesy if you do not 
keep your handkerchief ready for emergencies, and the 
promptitude with which each steamer as it approached 
broke out into a fluttering mass of white corroborated 
all she said. Every mother encouraged her child to 
" winken mit dem Taschen-Tuch," and the scenery glided 
past quite unnoticed, excepting perhaps when the Mouse 
Tower was passed, or one of the frequent Denkmals 
on the shore. 

A very pretty English girl on the steamer had in the 
course of the day grown friendly with a handsome young 
German, a nice cultivatedEnglish-speaking boy, who grew 
hour by hour visibly more entangled by the girl's perfect 
profile, lovely clear pale skin, and deep dark eyes. He 
hardly allowed his ardent gaze to stray from her beautiful 
face, while she on her part, in a mood of cool acquiescence, 
suffered herself to be worshipped, while she calmly 
sipped golden Mosel-Wein. Suddenly the steamer 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 27 

rounded a curve of the winding river, and a high bold 
rock came into sight. 

" There ! " cried the young man, starting forward 
with that pleasant German enthusiasm which sweeps 
one off one's feet. " There is the Lorelei rock ! The 
Lorelei ! " and he pointed across the river, his face aglow 
with rapture at the sight. Then he looked at the girl, 
waiting for her eyes to brighten with sympathy. 

" What is it ? " she said coldly. 

" The Lorelei ! " he said with emphasis. " The 
Lorelei ! " He stammered a little as her expression 
remained cold. " You've heard of the Lorelei, haven't 
you ? and the song about it that Heine wrote, ' Ich weiss 
nicht mass soil es bedeuten ' ? " 

He hummed it softly to himself, still looking at her 
face, still waiting for her to remember. 

But she had never heard of the Lorelei nor of Heine, 
and continued to play with her wineglass and to eat 
plums in a callous kind of manner, while her adorer, 
visibly chilled and repelled, looked wistfully at the rock, 
then at the girl, and finally, turning from the side of the 
steamer, shrank together in his chair in a crushed and 
wilted attitude. No German girl would have failed him 
at such a moment. She would have sung with him about 
the lovely maiden who sits combing her golden hair — 
but the Englishwoman had missed the psychological 
moment. One felt instinctively that upon his youthful 
heart was imprinted a conviction of the hopeless in- 
feriority of the British maiden, however beautiful, of 



28 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

her deficiency in knowledge, tact, and above all in 
sentiment. 

German sentiment ! It can be, and frequently is, a 
very beautiful thing. Embodied in German poetry, it 
expresses some of the most exquisite emotions of human 
life ; it touches domestic existence with a tender hand, 
and throws a golden glamour over the prosaic workaday 
world. It peoples every nook and corner of conscious- 
ness with an atmosphere of happiness which, though 
founded on illusion, yet is so universally accepted that 
it becomes almost real and adds a perfume to life. But 
occasionally it goes badly astray ; it demands expression 
at inopportune moments and in unsuitable places, is 
often unconsciously absurd. It was, I believe, Lowell 
who remarked that a foreigner cannot help being struck 
with a certain incongruousness in German sentiment. 
And though in the past we too have been guilty of 
dedicating crockery ware "To a Good Child " or "To 
One I Love," when we took to tennis and bicycles we 
said a long farewell to the tendency to advertise our 
smaller emotions on articles of utility or decoration. 
But the German still clings tenaciously to these outlets : 
he finds it ruhrend — touching — to go on his travels 
with his umbrella and raincoat tied up in a holland 
bag inscribed in uneven cross-stitch by his wife or 
daughter with the legend " Gluckliche Reise " — " A 
Happy Journey"; and a boy of sixteen or more will 
present his grandmother on her birthday with a 
large wooden tablet to hang on her bedroom wall 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 29 

upon which he has himself painfully poker-worked 
in Gothic letters the lines, 

"Fang die Arbeit munter an 
Dann ist sie schon halb gethan," — 

a couplet whose meaning is equivalent to our " Well 
begun, half done ! " 

When visiting a newly married couple, as soon as 
the front door is opened the crystallized good wishes 
of their numerous acquaintance meet one visibly on the 
threshold. A notice-board with " God bless the Young 
Pair " painted upon it in large letters stares at one 
over the umbrella rack, and every bit of available wall- 
space right up to the ceiling is filled by similar wooden 
boards echoing the same wish, or warmly commending 
the marriage state. " Eignes Herd, Goldes Werth " is a 
very favourite maxim, partly perhaps because it is short 
and easy to paint. The meaning of it is, " One's own 
fireside is worth gold." 

In the windows of the high-class photographers of 
Berlin and other towns may be seen every day numerous 
portraits of recently engaged young couples — Braut-Paar, 
as they are called — belonging to the higher circles of 
society. Smiling officers in uniform gaze with rapture 
into the eyes of the maiden of their choice, and both 
radiate an atmosphere of ecstatic bliss which they 
obviously burn to share with the outer world. Errand- 
boys and Dienst-Mddchen pause on their way and gaze ; 
brother-officers stop, fix an eyeglass, and recognizing a 



30 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

friend will casually remark, " Oh, there is von Plankau 
and his Braut, they are just engaged." 

That this conventional sentimentalism leads to a 
good deal of insincerity is hardly denied by the Germans 
themselves. The lady who brings a pot of pink tulips 
on your birthday and presents it with a nicely-rounded 
speech may be a person who detests you and makes 
no particular secret of it, but it will be none the less 
your duty to make tactful inquiries as to the date of her 
own appearance in the world and to bring her on that 
day, duly wrapped in heliotrope paper, a corresponding 
pot of carnations to mark the happy event. Yet the 
German method of making small domestic fetes of un- 
important occasions has a good deal of charm to recom- 
mend it, and it would be a very cynical person indeed 
who did not acknowledge that this phase of the German 
character is extraordinarily appealing to the unaccus- 
tomed stranger. However superficial the friendliness 
may have been that we experienced, however childish 
in its manifestations, we have to confess that it pleased 
and gratified us at the time, that we found it soothing 
to our amour-propre, very flattering to the part of our 
ego that likes to be thought of some importance in the 
small circle we adorn with our presence. 



QHAPTER III 
GERMAN MILITARISM 

SOME time after my tour of the Rhine, I spent 
several years in Germany, and acquired by slow 
degrees a more intimate knowledge of its people 
and their national aspirations. 

In the book mentioned in a previous chapter, which 
was written before the Great War began and published 
only a fortnight after it broke out, I have already told 
some of my experiences at the Prussian Court, where, 
in the summer of 1902, I became resident English 
governess to the Emperor's only daughter, Princess 
Victoria Louise of Prussia, now Duchess of Brunswick. 

That book pretended to be nothing more than a 
mere chronicle of domestic events, and of some singularly 
happy years, the memory of which now strikes with a 
peculiar chill pain and heartache across the ghastly 
wreck of the world's happiness which has since then 
supervened. 

It left untouched the many interesting aspects of 
German national life which presented themselves day 
by day, never advancing beyond the Court life and Court 
atmosphere. 



32 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

Those calm days foreshadowed but vaguely the 
years that were to follow them, but even then one was 
dimly conscious of an uneasy, restless spirit abroad, 
which seemed to conceal potentialities of trouble ; there 
were faint mutterings of the approaching storm, if one 
had only understood the signs of the times. 

At the Emperor's Court I naturally found myself in 
the centre of what is called " German militarism," the 
expression of the idea that national power can only be 
upheld by physical force. 

Potsdam, where the Court lived for the greater part 
of the year, is known to most people as a great military 
centre and enshrines in its old cobbled streets and stucco 
houses standing on each side of the placid tree-shaded 
canal, memories of Frederick the Great, who lived here 
at the palace of Sans Souci when not engaged on one 
of his numerous campaigns. 

When I first came to the Court I suffered from the 
usual British ignorances and prejudices, and I remember 
sympathizing with a teacher who mentioned the tax she 
paid out of her salary. 

" We don't have to begin to pay taxes in England," 
I said, " until our income gets a good deal higher than 
that." 

" Oh," she replied smilingly, " we pay this willingly. 
It is an Ehren-Taxe — a tax of honour — we are glad to 
pay it. It is for the defence of the Fatherland. No 
one thinks of grumbling. We all contribute gladly to 
what is for our own security." 





THE DUCHESS OF BRUNSWICK (PRINCESS VICTORIA LOUISE 

OF PRUSSIA) YOUNGEST CHILD AND ONLY DAUGHTER OF 

THE GERMAN EMPEROR 



GERMAN MILITARISM 33 

And what she said I often heard repeated, though 
occasionally fathers of large families were not quite so 
cheerful over it as she had been ; but they were evidently 
trained to look on it as a " tax of honour," of which no 
right-thinking person would try to shirk payment. 
Nothing was so striking among the German people as 
their identity of thought on all public matters. 

That the geographical position of the Empire, open 
to attack east and west, necessitated an efficient army 
was to the entire German nation a self-evident fact out- 
side the pale of discussion. 

" It's all very well for you English to talk about 
disarmament," said a young officer to me once, " but 
where should we be if we disarmed, with the French 
on one side eager to seize Elsass-Lothringen (Alsace- 
Lorraine) and the Russians on the other side of us none too 
friendly ? Besides, we don't want to depend on friendli- 
ness, we want to depend on our good right arm " — here he 
shook his fist — '•' we Germans fear God and nobody else." 
This climax to his sentence rounded it off nicely and 
enabled him to throw out his chest in the appropriate 
attitude of those who utter noble and patriotic senti- 
ments. Having heard and seen this phrase so often — I 
believe Bismarck first set it going — I was not much 
impressed, and even tried to show its fundamental un- 
trustworthiness and lack of confirmation. 

" You don't fear God," I said. " Most of you don't 
believe in Him, or if you do, you create one to your own 
liking — seven-tenths Bismarck and Clausewitz, and the 
3 



34 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

rest made up of recollections of the old bloodthirsty 
heathen deities of Valhalla, of Thor and Siegfried — and 
as for Alsace-Lorraine, it never has been anything but 
a worry and plague since you've had it. It's your own 
bad consciences, I expect, not the French, that make you 
so apprehensive. You know in your own hearts that 
you would never rest while a part of Germany was in 
the hands of an alien enemy." 

" But Elsass-Lothringen used to he part of Germany. 
It was taken away by Louis XIV." 

" Well, the people don't feel German — they feel 
French." 

" The people ! " he exclaimed, with much disdain ; 
" who cares what they feel ? What do they know 
about such matters ? It is their own fault if they are 
treated with severity. Do you know what they do ? 
When we conquered them they were a German-speaking 
race, and ever since then they've all learnt French — 
pretend they can't speak German ! " 

He looked at me as though he doubted if I would 
believe him. 

" Well, doesn't that show that they feel they are 
French ? " I persisted. 

Then he took refuge in Ireland. Any German officer 
driven into a corner in argument with the English 
invariably lands in Ireland. It is his chief refuge, and 
his misconceptions and ignorances as to the cause of 
Irish political discontent are almost as bad as those of 
the average English person. If we don't understand 



GERMAN MILITARISM 35 

the Irish question ourselves, unfortunate Germans, 
wandering helplessly among the turgid verbiage of our 
party newspapers, must remain hopelessly mystified. 
Still it is characteristic of the German mind to evolve 
some kind of clear theory out of the most unpromising 
mental chaos, and if this theory happens to be wrong, 
as it often is, it does not really matter to the German ; 
he prefers to work to a false theory rather than to none 
at all, and will make astonishingly effective plans to meet 
contingencies which are never likely to arise, all of which 
contributes to keep alive in him that mental alertness 
which he recognizes as a very necessary ingredient of an 
officer's utility. 

The man who related the hypothetical case of the 
different methods of the English, French, and German 
when required to draw a camel, a beast with which all 
three were unacquainted, hit upon the chief German 
national characteristic when he described the Teuton 
as " evolving the animal out of his inner consciousness." 
The German evolves a quantity of things besides camels 
out of his inner consciousness, and by a process of logical 
reasoning does not get so far from the mark as might be 
expected. There is no doubt that that camel would 
approximate, if not in structure, yet in its most im- 
portant characteristics, to the real thing. 

In England we have a totally wrong impression of 
the German military ideal. We believe the German 
people to be groaning and sighing under the burden of 
conscription and anxious to escape from it. We talk 



36 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

of Germans emigrating to England or America or other 
countries to escape military service. This may be the 
reason they give, it is so ready to hand that it is naturally 
seized upon before anything else, and we in our simplicity 
accept it as obvious, without giving any thought to the 
matter. As a rule the German who has left his country 
" to avoid military service " will probably have some 
still more important reason in the background. No 
decent German citizen, of whatever class, ever tried to 
avoid his] Dienst. On the contrary, he is keen and 
anxious to contribute, as he believes, to the safety of the 
Fatherland. 

One day a woman, the wife of a workman, who often 
did small dressmaking-jobs for me, came to my rooms 
to " try on " a blouse, looking rather agitated and 
upset. When I asked the reason she with difficulty 
restrained her tears. 

" Ach! gnddiges Frdulein ! " she said, " the Gendarm 
has been to my house, saying my son has been trying to 
evade his military service, and asking why he did not 
report himself at the proper time — my son whose greatest 
desire (heissesten Wiinsch) is to serve ! He can hardly 
wait till the time comes, and so ein Kerl — such a fellow 
j — to come to me and say things like that — my son who is 

so patriotic and " Here she broke down and sobbed, 

after an interval explaining that the mistake arose 
because her eldest son had died, and it was his name 
that had not been removed from the military register. 

" But to accuse us — honourable, respectable people 



GERMAN MILITARISM 37 

like us — of such a thing," she sniffed, sticking pins, in her 
agitation, into my arms ; " as if we were likely to do such 
a thing, and my son so eager and so looking forward " 

" But he is your only son now, isn't he ? " I asked. 

" Yes, now since der Johann died, of course he is our 
only one and not obliged to serve, but, gnddiges Frdulein, 
it would break his heart not to go ; and besides, you see, 
they get on much better afterwards. He hopes for a 
post on the Eisenbahn — the railway — so he must do his 
service or he can't get it, and he is such a clever boy. 
He's sure to get on. Every one says so." 

What she said was true. His chances in life would 
be immeasurably improved after his year's service. I 
never met a single German youth who did not look upon 
his military training as a matter of course. Agitated 
mothers would sometimes, it is true, deplore the fact 
that their darling sons would have to be out in all 
weathers, bearing hardships to which they were not 
accustomed, but as a rule they met with little sympathy. 

Still I noticed that the enthusiasm with which the 
recruits joined the army was completely overshadowed 
by the delirious joy with which they left it. After the 
big autumn manoeuvres were over in September, the 
culminating point and test of the year's work, at which 
the Emperor was invariably present, trains loaded with 
home-going soldiers, sun-browned young men from 
twenty to twenty-two, looking very fit and healthy, would 
pass along the line which ran through a field behind the 
New Palace, one of the few grass gallops in the neigh- 



38 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

bourhood where the little Princess delighted to ride. 
These trains were rilled with cheering, yelling youths 
whose shouting almost drowned the shrieks of the 
engine ; they hung out of every window in perilous 
positions, quite disregarding the command inscribed 
on every carriage, " Nicht hinaus lehnen " ; they waved 
their caps and hands joyfully out of the window at 
everybody they saw, at every cow in the fields, at every 
dog. At intervals the cheers rose in a crescendo wave of 
sound like thunder, and one had glimpses, in the thickly 
packed carriages, as of men performing wonderful 
gymnastics upside down. Sometimes a pair of legs 
would gyrate wildly at the windows and occasionally a 
very daring spirit would clamber outside and move 
along the top of the carriage to one a few yards farther 
down. 

" Why are they all so very jolly ? " I asked the 
Princess the first time that we saw them, as we were 
galloping down the Griiner Allee. 

" I suppose because they're so glad they've finished 
their service," replied the Princess, a little ruefully, for 
it is never admitted at the Prussian Court that a soldier 
ever gets tired of his service, and longs for a normal 
non-military existence. 

Certainly the world is governed by illusion, and 
Truth still resides in remote hidden places of the earth. 

In the rarefied Court atmosphere in which I moved, 
it was an accepted article of faith that every soldier 
of the Emperor's army became at once, through his 



GERMAN MILITARISM 39 

training, an honourable, upright man, imbued with a 
penetrating love of his Fatherland and ready to sacrifice 
his life with joy for his Kaiser. This creed was accepted 
so naturally as a self-evident fact that I sometimes 
wished that the ladies of the Court who had such an 
implicit faith in the noble spirit and angelic qualities 
of the individuals of their army could have read some 
of the anonymous letters that were almost daily to be 
found in the letter-bag of the little Princess, written by 
soldiers to the daughter of their Emperor. In the 
absence of the Ober-Gouvernante it was my unpleasant 
duty to go through these epistles, which needed very 
careful sifting. Some of them were harmless enough, 
chiefly picture-post-cards smelling dreadfully of very bad 
tobacco, and inscribed with " Greetings to Her Royal 
Highness Princess Victoria Louise of Prussia from her 
very loyal subject (allerunterthdnigste) Otto Kramm, 
now serving in the 15th Regiment of Infantry, at Colmar." 
Usually Monday morning brought a large crop of such 
messages, evidently written during the Sunday-evening 
leisure at some Garten-Restaurant. One indefatigable 
young man sent to the Princess all the used picture- 
post-cards, many of them beer-stained and of course 
highly tobacco-scented, which he could collect from his 
friends, and as Germany is a country where these 
articles are very cheap and the postage costs, for a 
short distance, only the tenth of a penny, every month 
there arrived from him a bulky package. They were 
usually at once consigned to the waste-paper basket 



40 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

or given to the footman to be burnt, for they were 
obviously very insanitary and bore a good many thumb- 
marks ; and the fact that these gifts were not altogether 
the offerings of a purely patriotic heart was revealed 
after some time, when the enterprising soldier, having 
fired off a salvo of extra-lurid picture-post-cards, followed 
them up by a humble request that the Princess should 
use her influence to enable him to obtain the rank 
of Unter-Offizier — equivalent to Corporal — which had 
hitherto eluded him. Other letters came from enthusiastic 
schoolgirls who often wrote very charmingly, but it is 
sad to relate that few were entirely disinterested expres- 
sions of loyalty, the lofty sentiments and assurances of 
deep devotion usually, alas ! being a preliminary to a 
request for some long-desired object, often the cast-off 
clothes or toys of the Princess. 

In the case of letters written by people in apparent 
need, inquiries were usually made and suitable help 
given. But there were always among the correspondence 
a few letters which were ultimately handed over to the 
police ; they often ran into several sheets and were of 
such a foul, unsavoury nature that their mere perusal 
left one with a sense of being besmirched with unutter- 
able filthiness. They were always from soldiers serving 
in the army, obviously degenerates and men of weak 
mind, and why these horrible letters should have been 
written to a little girl of tender years, is one of those 
mysteries which it is difficult to understand. I re- 
member sending some of them over to one of the gentle- 



GERMAN MILITARISM 41 

men of the Empress, whose duty it was to see that they 
were forwarded to the proper quarter. He was a 
splendid type of an honourable, upright German, and 
had been wounded in the foot during the Franco-Prussian 
War. He acted as Extra-Gentleman-in- Waiting, and 
only came on duty a few weeks of each year in the 
summer-time when the Emperor was in Norway and 
the Empress travelling or staying at Rominten. I 
remember the sad face with which he said, alluding 
to the letters : 

" How could one have imagined human nature to 
be so vile ? " 

After the year 1906, when the vicious youthful 
practices of some of the men of the Emperor's immediate 
entourage were revealed by Maximilian Harden, a 
scandal which, however, did not reflect on the Kaiser 
himself, the letters from the soldiers became nauseous 
reflections of the loathsome details recorded in the con- 
temporary newspapers, and were, if possible, more revolt- 
ing than usual. 

I only mention these disagreeable matters, which 
were as much as possible ignored, because they were 
in contradiction to the prevailing idea at Court that 
every soldier is necessarily a man whose character has 
been purged of the grosser elements, and in whose soul 
burns the pure fire of patriotism and self-sacrifice. That 
this is the ideal set before every man who enters the 
German Army is not to be denied, that a large percentage 
of the better-educated class during their military service 



42 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

strive to live up to this ideal, or at least persuade them- 
selves that they do, may also be conceded. There is 
perhaps a certain gramophone quality observable in all 
German patriotic sentiments, but it is, I believe, none the 
less sincere ; yet military discipline, especially German 
military discipline, which is extremely merciless and 
severe, can never eradicate, but only temporarily repress, 
natural tendencies. This obvious truth, however, was 
not admitted in the atmosphere of the Court, where the 
soldier was put on a very high pinnacle indeed. 

This was partly due to the fact that all the footmen of 
the Court had served in the army and were naturally men 
picked out for conspicuous honesty and faithfulness, 
though some of them, it must be admitted, were extra- 
ordinarily thick-headed. They were the cream of the 
army, good-looking, tall, well-educated, being nearly 
all of them Ein-jdhriger or one-year men, which pre- 
supposes a certain cultivated intelligence enabling them 
to pass the necessary examination which exempts them 
from one of the two years of service to which men who 
have not been able to arrive at a certain educational 
standard are liable. 

When I first arrived at the Prussian Court I was so 
deplorably ignorant of military matters that I had 
actually never seen the goose-step, and was first intro- 
duced to it by my young pupil, who, on the first wet day 
after my arrival, amused herself for a short time by 
performing sentry-go up and down the Turn-Saal with 
her brother Prince Joachim. 



GERMAN MILITARISM 43 

Assuming the usual masculine privilege, the Prince 
constituted himself corporal, giving the word of command, 
" Augen rechts, Augen links, Parade-Schritt, Prdsentirt 
das Gewehr ! " — and, being the only other person present, 
I was the recipient of more military honours during the 
next half -hour than is ever likely again to fall to my lot. 

I am still unaware if the goose-step is yet preserved 
as part of English military training, but to those to whom 
it is unknown, I may explain that it is called in Germany 
Parade-Schritt, and only used on occasions of ceremony 
or when troops are passing Royalty or officers of high 
rank. It consists in marching with the knee-joint per- 
fectly straight and gives a highly-curious strutting, stilted, 
jerking, waddling gait, which, especially when seen from 
the rear, is to the unaccustomed observer highly ludi- 
crous, as the performers have an appearance of trying 
to throw away their own feet. It is accompanied by 
loud stamping, and every day when the Court was in 
Berlin, during the ceremony of changing the guard at 
one o'clock, the Hof, or centre yard, paved with hard, 
round cobble stones, around which the Royal Schloss is 
built, resounded and echoed to martial music and the 
heavy rhythmic tread of the soldiers' feet, till the windows 
rattled and the solid walls seemed to shake. I believe 
this " Parade-step " was invented by Frederick the 
Great and copied by other nations at a time when, as 
the cynical monarch remarks in his " Confessions," " the 
world gave themselves up for lost if their military did 
not move head, legs, and arms, d la mode of the Prussian 



44 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

exercise. All my soldiers and my officers took it into 
their heads that they were twice the men they were 
before on seeing they were everywhere aped." 

Another wet day of those first years comes into my 
mind, when the little Princess was wandering through 
the State apartments of the Berlin Schloss with some of 
her young cousins who were on a visit. She stopped on 
the white- marble staircase to point out with pride one 
of the large military pictures hanging there, painted by 
Anton von Werner, where a charging squadron of Uhlans, 
in beautiful brand-new blue and red uniforms, with 
highly-polished buttons and accoutrements, mounted 
on specklessly well-groomed, prancing horses, whose 
shimmering coats reflected the bright blue sky above, 
occupied the forefront of the picture. Around them 
bombs were exploding picturesquely but harmlessly, and 
at a discreet distance in the rear there was a suggestion 
of fallen men and horses, while a further concession to the 
supposed realities of war was permitted in a thin trickle 
of blood flowing from beneath the helmet of the leading 
Uhlan. It was one of those pictures obviously painted 
by artists who judge of war by peace conditions and 
dare not, even if they would, reveal any of its tragic 
features, its bloodshed and ghastliness and horror of 
mangled limbs and torn flesh. It had a bright varnished 
appearance and was calculated to inspire unsophisticated 
youth with ideas of the splendour, the magnificence, of 
war. 

The children stood in a row, looking at the painting, 



GERMAN MILITARISM 45 

which nearly covered the entire wall of the landing, 
the little girls hand in hand, while the boys in their 
sailor suits hung over the marble balustrade and criti- 
cized the picture. 

" Look at that man in front, with his sword flashing. 
Isn't he splendid ? " cried the little Prussian Princess, 
with a proprietary air. " Papa had this picture painted ; 
he told the artist how it was to be done. Isn't it fine ? " 

Her face was aglow with patriotic pride. It was thus 
that she imagined German soldiers always riding to 
victory, as they did on parade, with pennons flying, and 
the sun glinting from their lance-heads. 

" Father says war isn't like that at all," objected 
little Max of Hesse, " it's not so clean and bright — and 
the shells tear the men and horses to pieces, and it's 
horrible. He says no one dare paint war-pictures as they 
really are — it would be discouraging for the soldiers." 

" How silly you are, Max ! " said the Princess. " Of 
course papa must know how it ought to be painted, and 
he says it's very good. And the soldiers do look like that 
— I've seen them galloping just as they do here." And 
Prince Joachim agreed too that the soldiers at reviews 
or on manoeuvres were exactly like those in the picture. 

" Papa sent Herr von Werner to look at the last 
manoeuvres, so that he could see exactly how it should 
be done," persisted the Princess. 

Prince Max still looked unconvinced, but said no 
more. He could not foresee, poor little boy, that when 
the Great War broke out he would be one of its earliest 



46 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

victims. He was a bright, sunny little fellow, of a 
quaint humour and quiet common sense, the eldest of 
six brothers, children of the Emperor's sister, Princess 
Frederick Charles of Hesse, who was the youngest and 
favourite daughter of the Empress Frederick. 

There were a good many of these sprawling canvases, 
of little artistic merit but portraying triumphant 
moments of Prussian history ; and in one of the galleries 
was a picture of a well-known general on horseback with 
Fame allegorically attired as an angel floating in the sky 
above him with a laurel wreath in her hand, with which 
she was obviously about to enwreathe his brows, while 
in the background the smoke and flames of burning 
villages were to be seen ascending heavenwards. Crowds 
of peasants lay heaped about in attitudes of death or 
acute misery, but the smiling, about-to-be-crowned con- 
queror had his back turned toward all these unpleasant 
incidents, for which, though plainly responsible, he seemed 
to repudiate all liability. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE GERMAN SOLDIER 

""^ 7" OUR army fights for pay, ours for love of the 
| Fatherland." 

How often have I heard this speech from 
Germans, especially from German children, who, like 
children everywhere, delight to flap the flag of their 
country in the faces of persons of other nationalities. 

" Our soldiers are all volunteers," I of course would 
reply. " Yours are obliged to serve whether they want 
to or not." 

" But yours serve for pay," they always continued 
stoutly. 

" They could earn a good deal more by not being 
soldiers," I would maintain, battling as in duty bound 
for my own people ; " and if it comes to that, your 
soldiers are paid too." 

•■ No, indeed they're not," would answer the scream- 
ing chorus ; " they serve from VaterlandsMebe, not for 
money." 

The tone of scorn in which the word " money " was 
pronounced showed the depth of their contempt for 
English soldiers. 

47 



48 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

"Your soldiers — private soldiers," I would persist, 
" get fivepence a week pocket money, ours get a shilling 
a day : we should think scorn to pay brave men so little 
as you do. And as for the officers, they don't work for 
nothing in your army either ; they are paid, so try not 
to talk nonsense." 

The reminder that their officers received money left 
them speechless, because they knew it was true. 

" Still, ours do it for love ; everybody has to serve if 
he is wanted," they would continue helplessly. 

" Well, none of ours has to do it, so those that do 
must do it for love," I answer, trying to believe that 
what I am saying is true, and thinking of the many 
other than patriotic motives — crime, despair, want, and 
love — that often drive men into the army. 

The little Princess at an early stage of our acquaint- 
ance was an ardent upholder of the German military 
system, and a most bitter critic of the British Army ; 
but later on she modified her opinions, and became an 
admirer of, at any rate, the British officer, and, after 
her visit to England, of the British soldier. 

German patriotism is a carefully cherished plant 
in the Fatherland, not left nor expected to grow 
spontaneously, but the seeds of it are sown with much 
care, in well prepared soil. It is " intensively culti- 
vated " with all the patient, painstaking, glowing en- 
thusiasm of the German race, and the results justify 
the methods employed ; for the diverse units of which the 
German Empire is composed have attained a solidarity, 



THE GERMAN SOLDIER 49 

in spite of intrinsic differences of character, a unity of 
mind and purpose, an absolute unanimity of national 
ideal which no other country can boast. 

Every soldier in the Fatherland is trained not only to 
be an excellent soldier, but an excellent patriot ; he is 
taught — if he does not already know them — the songs 
which breathe an ardent passionate love of his Emperor 
and country ; his barrack walls are hung with pictures 
showing, in greatly exaggerated colours and with an 
obvious lack of correct military knowledge on the part 
of the artist, famous incidents in the history of his 
regiment, melodramatic moments where a triumphant 
German, in a spick-and-span uniform, on a highly- 
groomed horse, with a complete absence of bloodshed 
or any of the messy incidents which characterize real 
warfare, is killing, single-handed, a dozen Frenchmen 
who lie in neat rows in front of him. However ignorant 
and muddle-headed a German recruit may be, — and some 
of those who come from East and West Prussia are of a 
primitive and bucolic thick-headedness which is almost 
incredible, — he is carefully and painstakingly taught, not 
only his drill, but is instructed in all that can increase 
his intelligence, that can inspire him with a feeling of 
national pride. The deeds of the heroes of the past are 
used to stimulate him to similar deeds in the future. 
He may be an unpromising piece of raw material, but he 
is taken in hand by the big military machine and kneaded 
into something a good deal better than he was before — 
that is, if he meets with the ordinary normal treatment 
4 



50 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

of the army ; but it cannot be denied that a great deal 
of overt brutality exists among the non-commissioned 
officers which, when discovered, is severely punished, 
but for the most part evades detection. By a little 
change of the system these sporadic brutalities might 
be more easily discovered and suppressed, but it is 
useless to pretend that they do not exist, though sternly 
discouraged. But this makes no difference to the 
general trend of a German soldier's existence, which is 
all in the direction of increased efficiency in the matter 
of health, intelligence, and last, but not least, in the 
stimulation of a somewhat narrow spirit of patriotism, 
the kindling in his heart, if it does not yet exist, of the 
belief that the German Empire is superior to every other 
country in the world, that the German people are the 
wisest and the best, and that to the present Emperor 
all these superior qualities are due. 

Bernhardi tells us the obvious truth that " Military 
service not only educates nations in warlike capacity, 
but it develops the intellectual and moral qualities 
generally for the occupations of peace. It educates a 
man to the full mastery of his body, to the exercise 
and improvement of his muscles ; it develops his mental 
powers, his self-reliance and readiness of decision ; it 
accustoms him to order and subordination for a common 
end ; it elevates his self-respect and courage, and thus 
his capacity for every kind of work. 

" It is quite a perverted view that the time devoted 
to military service deprives economic life of forces which 



THE GERMAN SOLDIER 51 

could have been more appropriately and more profitably 
employed elsewhere. These forces are not withdrawn 
from economic life, but are trained for economic life." 

And we must agree that Germany, with her easy- 
going, pleasure-loving population, without the stimulus 
of sport — for in spite of the fact that sport during the 
last few years has been increasingly practised by a 
certain class of Germans, it has as yet left the mass of the 
people absolutely uninterested and untouched — would, 
without military training, hardly have risen to the place 
she occupied in public estimation before the war began. 
1 The first German soldier I ever met was in the fortress 
of Ehrenbreitstein. He was carrying a bowl of soup 
which he regarded with affection, and he leered bucolicly 
as he passed our small group of tourists. He looked 
brown and healthy and rather stupid, and his blue coat, 
with red collar and cuffs, fitted him very badly, but his 
white linen trousers gave a pleasant air of coolness to 
his attire, and when, after turning a curve of the road 
which led up to the citadel, we came on a big gateway 
with other similarly-dressed soldiers under it, apparently 
engaged in tickling each other, we thought that the 
severity of German militarism had been exaggerated. 
These nice, brown-faced boys, grinning at large, seemed 
too lazy, too slow, too good-tempered, to be a danger 
to anyone. One felt an instinctive liking for the childish 
simplicity of their manners, but when an officer came 
out, they became so immediately stiff and wooden, fell 
with such promptitude into the correct military attitude, 



52 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

their very eyes growing glassy and staring, that one had 
glimpses of what training will make of a man, how the 
clod-like instincts of these docile boys could be utilized 
by the man with the superior brain-power. He could 
command hundreds of them — thousands — as many as he 
pleased, and each one, being only " a simple soldier," 
not desiring, nor being encouraged to think out things 
for himself, would blindly do as he was told, leaving 
the responsibility to those whose business it was to 
arrange affairs. 

Years after, at the New Palace, Potsdam, I lived 
surrounded by soldiers, falling to sleep every night with 
the step of the sentry beneath my bedroom window 
mingling with my dreams. One woke sometimes to 
hear the rain thrashing down, or in the winter-time to 
hear the wind bringing great flurries of snow against 
the double windows, and turned over in bed with a 
pitying thought for the young soldiers whose duty it was 
to patrol the terrace outside the Palace windows from 
sunset to dawn, relieved, of course, every two hours. In 
very bitter weather they were supplied with fur-lined 
boots and gloves and an extra heavy top-coat. In the 
moonlight one sometimes could peep between the curtains 
and see them coming on or going off guard, tramping 
with difficulty through the thick snowdrifts. 

No one could pass in or out of the Palace grounds 
without a duly authorized entrance-card, the date of 
which was sometimes changed every year and some- 
times not. The card with which I was first provided 



THE GERMAN SOLDIER 53 

lasted for five years, then one day, on showing it to the 
sentry, he slammed the gate in my face and refused to 
allow me in. As, being a resident of the Palace, I 
happened to have a pass-key in my pocket which enabled 
me to open all locked gates, I was not much perturbed, 
and as there was one of these gates leading into the 
garden close at hand, I unlocked it under the nose of 
the sentry and passed through, anxiously watching him 
out of the corner of my eye the while, and choosing an 
adjacent bush as " cover " in case he should think it 
his duty to raise his rifle and shoot me. If, as occasion- 
ally happened, I had neither pass-key nor entrance-card, 
it was necessary to tell the sentry to ring a bell which 
communicated with the guard-room, and one of the guard 
was sent to escort me to the Palace itself. I believe I 
ought to have been conducted to the porter's room 
and handed over to a footman, who then became re- 
sponsible for me ; but as the entrance to my own rooms 
was arrived at long before we reached the Portier-Stube, 
I generally slipped through the open glass door and 
went upstairs, while the soldier no doubt wondered 
where I had disappeared, for doors and windows were 
all alike and stood wide open in the summer-time. One 
conscientious youth, in his search for me, — perhaps, too, 
haunted by fears that I might be a possible anarchist 
whom he must run to ground, — penetrated as far as the 
apartment of the Princess, where his somewhat confused 
inquiry for Die Dame was met by a severe scolding for 
being where he had no business, and he was threatened 



54 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

with severe punishment by an angry footman who called 
him a " Dummer Kerl " — a stupid fellow. All messengers 
with parcels were thus escorted into and out of the 
Palace, also all visitors, even those who came in carriages. 
Sometimes the ladies-in-waiting were very angry if 
they happened to have been out walking and forgotten 
their cards, at being thus ignominiously kept waiting and 
treated rather rudely by the sentries, who had no idea 
how to combine firmness with urbanity ; but the Emperor 
only laughed if they complained, singing the praises of 
the soldiers for their unflinching zeal. In Berlin Schloss, 
on the contrary, one might walk in and out all day 
without any trouble. It was only after nightfall that 
a card was necessary, not only for coming in but for 
going out of the court-yard. 

In Wilhelmshohe the sentries were posted in the 
evenings close up to the front door in the middle of the 
big facade of the Palace, under a large stone portico ; 
and on one occasion, when the Empress had ordered 
supper to be laid under the portico, when she came out 
she found a sentry at each end of the table presenting 
arms, both of them evidently prepared to stay there 
and watch over her safety for the rest of the evening. 
We had to wait for supper till the officer of the guard 
was summoned and the soldiers posted a little farther 
off, somewhere round the corner where they would be 
equally useful and less in the way. 

When out riding early in the summer mornings in 
the fields lying on the outskirts of Potsdam, I frequently 



THE GERMAN SOLDIER 55 

had glimpses of the pleasantest part of the soldier's 
training. Uhlans with fluttering pennons would gallop 
along the open cart-tracks in the fields which run between 
rows of beautiful trees, or a battery of artillery in a cloud 
of dust emerged into view, the horses' coats shining, the 
men sitting on the gun-limbers hot and dusty and cheery- 
looking. Often they were out at four o'clock in the 
morning, so that by nine, when it was already hot with 
the stuffy, heavy, Continental heat of summer, the 
chief part of the day's work would be done. In the 
afternoons one might see the soldiers hanging out of 
the barrack windows, smoking, or looking at the passers- 
by. Once, and only once, did I see some German soldiers 
kicking a football about, but with a dismal air, as of men 
performing a duty with determination and goodwill 
but no enthusiasm. I suspect somehow that they had 
been ordered by the Highest Military Power in Germany 
to take to football as a suitable recreation and didn't 
quite know how to play the game — also I should imagine 
that when a German soldier has got through his day's 
work he prefers something less strenuous. There is, as a 
matter of fact, a German species of Fuss-Ball played by 
schoolboys, which is a mere faint shadow of the English 
game, and is, as the Germans themselves call it, a Kinder' 
Spiel — a game for children. 

I have vivid memories, too, of croquet as played from 
what may be called the Early-German standpoint. It 
was on a small court of rather uneven sand, and the 
participants were the Princess and her school-companions, 



56 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

the three little girls from the neighbouring Augusta-Stift 
who came every day to share her lessons. When I 
suggested playing on the grass, the Princess was shocked 
at the idea. She said it would spoil it, and papa would 
be very angry. The rather battered-looking hoops 
appeared to have been bent open so as to facilitate 
the passage of the balls, and were almost twice as wide 
at the bottom as a regulation hoop should be. The 
" elliptical billiard-balls " of the " Mikado " might have 
been paralleled by ours, which seemed to have suffered 
severely from ill-usage ; and when, under the guidance 
of the Princess, who said she was " awfully fond of 
the game," I saw the little girls all merrily croqueting 
each other, with one foot on the ball in the good 
old-fashioned Early- Victorian way reminiscent of the 
crinoline period in back volumes of " Punch," my 
heart sank a little, and I stood hesitating and wonder- 
ing if tactful interference on my part would be of any 
good. 

When presently one unskilled performer hammered 
her foot instead of the ball, I ventured to make a remark. 

" You know," I said firmly, " nobody plays croquet 
in this way now — the rules have been altered. Don't 
you think you'd like to learn the proper way ? " It 
struck me as soon as I had said it that the word " proper " 
was perhaps tactless and ill-chosen. The sequence showed 
I was right. 

" No, this is the proper German way," replied the 
Princess, who I am convinced had no experience what- 



THE GERMAN SOLDIER 57 

ever of " German " croquet. " You can play your way 
in England, we play the German way." 

" But there is no such thing as ' German ' or 
' English ' croquet," I replied, laughing, — " there's just 
croquet. What you are playing isn't real croquet — the 
real game is much more amusing." 

However, they stuck to what they pleased to call 
" German croquet," till one day the Empress arrived 
in the middle of the game, and joining in it swept to the 
four winds all their theories. She knew what croquet 
was, and laughed at what she called their " gam ver- 
alteter " — quite old-fashioned — ideas on the subject. 
She ordered a brand-new croquet set " made in England," 
and though we had to continue playing on the sand 
of the Spiel-Platz, with a " giant's-stride " in the 
middle and parallel bars at each side, which somewhat 
circumscribed our movements and necessitated certain 
modifications of the game, until the Princess a few years 
later, with characteristic energy, took to tennis, croquet 
remained a very favourite amusement. When, later on, 
she met English friends who were croquet enthusiasts, it 
always amused me to hear her talk with them of the 
game, knowing that her ideas were of the sandy Spiel- 
Platz full of inequalities and obstacles, while theirs were 
of a lawn smooth as a billiard-table, of Prize Meetings 
and championships, of a scientifically played game 
hedged about with innumerable rules and formalities. 

I noticed the Princess was always a little con- 
temptuous of the English love of croquet, while the 



58 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

English on their side were slightly bewildered ; but they 
were each obviously thinking of different things, and 
suffering from the mutual misunderstandings which 
arise from want of knowledge. 

To return to the German soldier as I knew him in 
peace-time. It is a common error in England to believe 
that every fit man of military age in Germany is trained. 
This, however, is not so, as there are always a great 
many more men available than are necessary to keep up 
the strength of the army, this even in view of the fact 
that exemption from service is granted in the case of 
only sons of a widowed mother, or men who can prove 
that their help is needed to support their brothers, 
sisters, or parents. Every German, however, from 
seventeen to twenty-one, and from thirty-nine to forty- 
five, is a member of the Landsturm — a force which is 
only to be called out in the last necessity. Those 
Germans chosen as soldiers must remain three years 
with the cavalry, two with the infantry. If they pass 
the necessary examination before leaving school, their 
service is shortened respectively by one year. 

Once, when walking with the little Princess and her 
brother in the garden of Bellevue, we came upon some 
men cutting down a tree which they afterwards loaded 
upon a cart. Naturally the children were much inter- 
ested in the proceedings, and remained some time looking 
on. The governor of the Prince, a young Prussian 
lieutenant who was with us, asked the stalwart young 
woodman who was directing the work in which regiment 



THE GERMAN SOLDIER 59 

he had served, and the man in very apologetic tones 
replied that he had never served at all, as unfortunately 
the day before he should have presented himself at his 
recruiting station he had the misfortune to break his 
leg. He was, I believe, perfectly sincere in his expressions 
of regret, and the lieutenant confided to me how very 
grieved he felt that such a fine soldier should have been 
lost to the army. 

The German non-commissioned officer receives a very 
careful training. Just a short distance outside the New 
Palace stands the big Augusta- Victoria Kaserne, the 
barracks where was lodged the Lehr-Bataillon, consisting 
of promising young soldiers who were likely to make good 
instructors. They were sent here to be trained in their 
manifold military duties, and appeared to be very keen, 
intelligent-looking young men, who took life very seri- 
ously. Sometimes, when I went for a stroll in the neigh- 
bouring cornfields, I would come across them struggling 
to teach young recruits how to shoot. Their targets 
always struck me as primitive. They were just the 
outline of a man cut out life-size in wood and painted in 
bright blues and yellows. It was one of the duties of a 
corporal in command of a squad of men outside barracks 
to report to any officer he might meet, the number, regi- 
ment, and business on which he and his men were engaged, 
and as all the sons of the Emperor at ten years of age 
were made lieutenants in infantry regiments, soldiers 
had to report to them the same as to other officers. It 
was rather startling and a little tiresome when Prince 



60 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

Joachim was going for a walk with his sister and a passing 
file of soldiers would appear round the corner, suddenly 
stop, come to attention, and the foremost one, looking 
rather scared, begin to shout out in the orthodox sten- 
torian military tone the information that " one corporal 
and two private soldiers of the 18th Regiment of 

Infantry now on their way to " 

At this point Prince Joachim would usually interpose 
and intimate that he would dispense with any further 
report ; but the man generally preferred to finish, and 
recited the rest of his story as the Prince and his sister 
hurried on, leaving the corporal to finish at his leisure. 
Once the Prince and Princess emerged from the Palace 
gates riding on donkeys, and accompanied by a young 
lady-in-waiting who was similarly mounted. The 
donkeys were not very well trained animals, and after 
the manner of their kind took a very zigzag, indirect 
course over the road, quite regardless of tugs at the 
bridle. The party was feeling very hilarious, when just 
at the moment when all three donkeys began to exhibit 
an invincible tendency to keep on turning round, four 
soldiers, obviously on military duty, were to be seen 
approaching, walking in single file one behind the other. 
The donkeys, as though moved by a common impulse, 
continued to gyrate slowly but relentlessly in various 
eccentric orbits, while the soldiers, without moving a 
muscle of their faces, continued to advance, halted at a 
spot which the corporal evidently judged to be outside 
the danger zone, and there, with the precision of a 




PRINCE JOACHIM OF PRUSSIA, SIXTH SON OF THE GERMAN 
EMPEROR 



THE GERMAN SOLDIER 61 

machine, in the usual short staccato tones, he gave 
details of himself and men and of the military duty they 
were about to perform. Once he was interrupted, when 
one of the donkeys with the annoying tactlessness of 
its kind backed into him and nearly swept him into the 
ditch ; but he managed to evade the danger, and, resuming 
his martial attitude a few paces farther back, completed 
his report. 

The three riders were by this time helpless with 
laughter and quite unable to exercise any restraining 
influence over their steeds, and the highly disorganized 
cavalcade were at last relieved from their embarrassing 
situation by the donkeys, evidently home-sick for their 
stable, taking sudden and precipitate flight in the direc- 
tion of the Palace. 

Often in the summer-time, in her drives about the 
villages that lie in the neighbourhood of Potsdam, the 
little Princess would be delighted to come upon Ein- 
quartierung — that is, soldiers billeted for one or two 
nights in a village. Perhaps it would be part of a battery 
of artillery, the guns placed on the little village green in 
front of the church, with a sentry keeping guard over them. 
In the big farm-yard, soldiers could be seen, busy cleaning 
horses and saddlery ; and outside every cottage men, 
women, and children were standing smiling at the soldiers. 
Although the sum paid for the food and lodging of a 
soldier is very small, yet the peasants seem to enjoy the 
stir and excitement, and as most of them have sons or 
relations of their own serving in the army, they give 



62 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

as a rule, of their best, and feel a certain pleasant sense 
of proprietorship in the big military machine. 

As a rule, Ein-quartierung took place in the early 
summer, when the barns were empty, so that there was 
plenty of accommodation for the horses ; while the men, 
if there was not sufficient accommodation in the houses, 
also slept in sheds and stables. The troops on the march 
were usually regiments of cavalry or artillery, moving 
by road from one point to another, training for the 
great Kaiser-Manover, which was held in September 
after the harvest was gathered in, when the bare, unf enced 
stubble-fields were least liable to damage from the 
numberless men, horses, and guns which passed over 
them. Sufficient but not generous compensation was 
invariably paid to the peasants whose fields suffered ; 
and every year the Kaiser-Manover, the culminating 
test of the year's military work, was held in a different 
district, so that the troops should learn to accustom them- 
selves to unknown conditions. Map-reading is one of 
the arts in which the German soldier has always been 
diligently trained and exercised. 



CHAPTER V 
THE GERMAN OFFICER 

UPON my former acquaintanceship with various 
types of German officer I look back with mixed 
feelings. The best type was so invariably charm- 
ing and cultured, but when one encountered the worst — 
the small petty- minded person dressed, not in a little brief 
authority but in a permanent one, safeguarded from 
all attacks — he often proved to be an extraordinarily 
hateful and contemptible specimen of humanity, of a 
calibre of mind hard to realize by those who never met 
him. Between these two extremes, the very good and 
the very bad, were many other types — amiable and in- 
dustrious young men, living anxiously on small means, 
fervently hoping to have the luck to fall in love with a 
lady who would have enough private fortune to bring 
their united incomes up to the minimum sum upon which 
the German Government permits officers of the army to 
marry. 

Potsdam may be considered the central stronghold 
of Prussian militarism. 

Close to the Garrison Church, where rest in a curious 

little crypt behind the pulpit the ashes of Frederick the 

63 



64 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

Great beside those of his irascible, child-beating father, 
is the wide, arid parade-ground — still called the Lust- 
Garten — from which that same irritable parent incon- 
tinently swept away all the shrubs and flower-beds, so 
that he might have a place close under the windows of 
the Stadt-Schloss, which he inhabited in summer, to 
drill the tall soldiers of whom he was so fond. Carlyle's 
praise of this extraordinary king has always appeared 
to me highly exaggerated and not justified by facts, 
and it has had a curious effect on the German mind, 
especially the military mind. From his ill-treatment of 
his son, Frederick the Great, Germans generally seem 
to have deduced the inference that the ill-usage of the 
father, the cruel severity verging on murder which he 
exhibited towards his unfortunate son in his childhood 
and early youth, were the chief factors in developing 
the military genius and intelligent statesmanship with 
which Frederick is universally credited. 

It was Prince Joachim's governor who first made me 
acquainted with this point of view. He no doubt 
thought that I should be very pleased to hear that 
Carlyle was the man who, so to speak, " discovered " 
the splendid qualities and underlying good intentions 
not immediately apparent on the surface of Frederick 
William I of Prussia's eccentric activities. 

"I think he was a horrid, cruel, bad-tempered wretch," 
I remarked, forgetting for the moment that I was 
speaking of a crowned member of the Hohenzollern 
family. " It was purely temper that made him behave 



THE GERMAN OFFICER 65 

as he did. I've known lots of other people go on in 
just the same way, only the law steps in if they take to 
hitting their children. Brutality can't develop good 
qualities. It was in spite of, rather than because of 
his father, that Frederick became what he was." 

But the Princess and Prince Joachim, who were 
listening with interest to the conversation, joined with 
the governor in a chorus of protest. 

" Oh no, nothing of the kind. Every one says it 
was because his father was so stern, so strict with him, 
that he became such a clever man. It made him a 
splendid soldier. You see, his father made him drill 
and do everything he didn't like, that's why he turned 
out so well — every one sees it. Even your Carlyle saw it 
— he wrote a book about it. All the beatings and things 
that seem so cruel were really the best that could have 
happened, they knocked all the silly French nonsense 
out of him." 

" Oh, indeed ! Did they ? Then why did he all his 
life talk French, and read French books, and admire 
French architecture ? Why did he despise German 
literature ? " 

The governor smiled, and sorrowfully admitted that 
Frederick's French tastes were unfortunately undeniable, 
and had survived the heavy-handed father's batter- 
ing ; he consoled himself, however, with the thought of 
his vindictive quarrel with Voltaire, and we glided by 
imperceptible degrees to other less controversial subjects. 
I had occasion later on to find the governor's view 
5 



66 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

of this choleric historical personage shared by most 
of his countrymen and women. The German Ober- 
Gouvemante of the Princess was astonished that anyone 
could doubt the extreme value, in developing a sturdy 
and patient efficiency, of the corporal punishment he 
distributed with such lavish impartiality, and the various 
tutors and visiting teachers who came to the Palace 
were of the same mind. When I, wondering if this 
sameness of opinion might be just an effect of the Court 
atmosphere, which would not permit anyone to entertain 
the idea that a king, especially a Hohenzollern king, 
can do wrong, pursued my researches farther into the 
remoter circles of society outside the Court, I found no 
difference. They all accepted the self-evident fact that 
Frederick had when young been beaten, starved, im- 
prisoned, threatened with death, that he had become 
docile and submissive as a whipped dog, and that he had 
emerged into a military genius, therefore the beating, 
starvation, imprisonment, etc., must have been very 
good for him, and might — but for the less robust age in 
which we live — be employed with equally good results 
in the present day. 

It was not till I had been living some years in Ger- 
many that I at last found — in a railway-carriage — the 
German for whom I had so long been looking — one who 
had not accepted the theory that Frederick the Great's 
character had been created by his father's ill-treatment ; 
but she — it was a lady, a most delightful fellow-traveller 
whose name I never knew — was the only person I ever 



THE GERMAN OFFICER 67 

met in the Fatherland whose ideas on the subject coincided 
with mine, and I am glad to think, in view of all that 
has happened since then, that she was more emphatic 
against brutality and harsh treatment of people in general 
than I — walking delicately in a foreign country and 
afraid to handle national prejudices too roughly — had 
ever dared to be. 

The German officer is naturally very much in evi- 
dence at Potsdam. He may be met riding in the woods 
outside ; he pervades the street in his brilliant uniform ; 
he drives his smart dog-cart of afternoons in the out- 
skirts. If he happens to ride by in the full-dress uniform 
of the Prussian Life-Guards, crowned by the dazzling 
helmet upon which is perched the Prussian eagle with 
outstretched wings and menacing beak, looking as though 
ready on the slightest provocation to fly in anyone's 
face, those who see him feel that they have looked on 
the embodied spirit of German militarism. He looks 
arrogant, of course. It is his duty when in uniform to 
create an atmosphere of arrogance, to browbeat and 
terrorize with a look anyone who crosses his path. A 
Prussian soldier is taught to feel and to look truculent 
as long as he is in uniform, and he often carries the 
characteristic with him into private life, although with 
the laying aside of his uniform he is divested of his chief 
inspiration and stimulus. A man has a different soul 
when he wears civilian clothes, and — an almost invari- 
able rule in Germany — he also loses terribly in personal 
appearance, 



68 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

I remember a young lieutenant of Reserve who had 
certain duties to perform in connexion with the house- 
hold of the Emperor. He was never seen out of the 
uniform which belonged to his office, and had appeared 
to be a slender, but well-made, good-looking young man. 
Then one unlucky day, when the Court was in residence 
at Wilhelmshohe, he was invited to luncheon at the 
Royal table, and the mysterious etiquette governing 
Court functions decreed that he must appear in ordinary 
civilian morning dress. He was so changed that he was 
with difficulty recognizable. It may have been partly 
the fault of his civilian tailor, who, unlike the military 
one, had not grasped the overwhelming truth that 
" where Nature fails then Art steps in," but the officer 
stood revealed as possessing in an acute degree what 
are called " bottle shoulders " and an otherwise miser- 
able and insignificant physique. He wore a painful, 
apologetic smile, and seemed fully conscious of his own 
deficiencies. 

" How I hate to be out of uniform ! " he complained. 
" I can't feel at home in anything else. I shan't be happy 
till I get back into my good grey tunic. One feels such 
a worm in Civil." 

" He looks a worm," murmured one of the ladies of 
the Court, — " with shoulders like that, anyone would. 
He ought to do Miiller's exercises every day." 

There was an old Sattel-Meister who often rode with 
the ladies, a handsome old man, not unsuspected of 
adventitious aids to beauty such as may be afforded by 



THE GERMAN OFFICER 69 

hair-dye. Many German officers, both commissioned 
and non-commissioned, resort to such help, not so much 
inspired by personal vanity as by the fact that an appear- 
ance of age is always detrimental to an officer's prospects 
of advancement in his career. Baldness is not of so much 
consequence, because the majority of officers of the 
regular army are bald before they are thirty — a result, it 
is supposed, of the constant wearing of the ill-ventilated 
Pickel-Haube and other types of helmet. 

The Sattel-Meister — equivalent in rank to a serjeant 
of cavalry — was an interesting old man, whose function 
was to supervise the training of the horses of the Em- 
press, to attend Her Majesty when out riding, and also 
to accompany those ladies of the Court who liked to ride 
for their own amusement. He and I had many canters 
together in the pleasant Wildpark or in the forest, and 
over the big cavalry Exerzier-Platz. He was a man 
prodigal of his conversation, which was of inestimable 
benefit to the somewhat elementary German with 
which I started my career at Court. He was also 
very intelligent, with a great respect for the English, 
and we discussed together many interesting matters. 
Among other things he, to my surprise, spoke bitterly 
against a proposed increase of the German Army which 
was then being discussed in the Reichstag. 

" We already have too many soldiers," he said, with 
his face darkening ; " what do we want with more ? It 
will only make trouble with other countries. It is an 
unnecessary burden on the people. And those who 



70 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

have to pay the piper may not call the tune. Too many 
soldiers is worse than too few — they become our 
masters." 

This from a man who had fought in the Franco- 
Prussian War and been practically all his life a soldier 
astonished me considerably. 

" But," I laughed, " I thought that here in Germany 
every one was so devoted to the army, so proud of it, 
and so ready to pay the piper — all, of course, excepting 
the Socialists." 

" The Socialists ? " he growled. " The Socialists are 
quite right — the people are getting tired of paying for the 
army. It is dangerous in many ways. Military service 
is all right, — it is good to give a year to one's country, — 
but we are going too far — too far " 

We were passing those funny targets — in the shape of 
men — at which the soldiers of the garrison had been 
practising shooting, and commenting on the appearance 
of these wooden figures, I, in a bantering mood, sug- 
gested to him that in the minds of the soldiers they 
represented Englishmen. 

But the old Sattel-Meister strenuously resented the 
idea. 

" Gott hewahre ! " he ejaculated piously. " What have 
Germans and Englishmen to fight over ? " 

" Why, nothing at all," I answered. 

" Natiirlich — nothing ! " repeated the Sattel-Meister ; 
" but then there are politicians, — there is Welt Politik 
and Wasser Politik," — I think he was referring to the 



THE GERMAN OFFICER 71 

German Navy and the " Future on the Water," — " and 
politicians are like the Almighty, they can create some- 
thing out of nothing. The German people don't want 
to fight, and I don't suppose the English people do either, 
but if the politicians happen to be the dummer Kerls — 
stupid fellows — they often are, then there will be 
trouble, and the people will pay." 

He paused a minute, and our horses jogged on down 
the shady lane beneath the acacia-trees, whose beautiful 
pendent white blossoms scented the air with their 
lovely warm perfume. 

" Elsass-Lothringen ! " he ejaculated, as though 
overcome by some bitter memories. " We took it from 
the people, we drove many of them from their homes, 
and what good is it to us now ? A constant danger ! 
Are the people there happy and contented ? No. When 
I go to Urville with the Empress, there is a tea for the 
children round the Schloss, and they put in the ' Tagliche 
Rundschau ' a paragraph describing it and the happiness 
and content of the people — under German rule. It is 
all Quatsch. They are not happy and contented. And 
when the children grow up, they are more bitter than their 
parents. Tea at the Schloss ! You can't make a 
conquered people content by giving them Pfeffer-Kuchen 
and coffee." 

I agreed that more than this was needed. 

Sometimes the Sattel-Meister appeared in grim and 
gloomy mood, and I then usually discovered that he had 
had difficulties with one of the Stall-Meistcrs, Junior 



72 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

Masters of the Horse they may be called — the officials 
who were in authority and responsible for the working 
of the stables. On such occasions, if I waited a little 
while and gave the Sattel-Meister time to conquer his 
vexation, I usually found myself the recipient of various 
confidences and opinions with regard to these young 
men ; who, it must be admitted from my own experience 
of them, were sometimes extraordinarily irritating in 
their love of showy authority, and very jealous of the 
supposed influence and consequent advantage that an 
old official of long and faithful service might be presumed 
to possess. The Sattel-Meister had lived and served 
in other times, under old officers of a different type 
from the modern young German, and perhaps it was in- 
evitable that he should draw comparisons unflattering 
to the younger generation. 

When at last the old Sattel-Meister, who was long past 
the age when he might legitimately apply for a pension, 
decided to retire from service and so escape the eternal 
pin-pricks of the young officers above him whom he 
most cordially detested, I naturally wished to present 
him with a small souvenir of the pleasant rides which we 
had had together, and going to the stables for the purpose 
passed on the way, just a few yards from the stable- 
door, a figure m plain clothes which reminded me vaguely 
of the rather untidy Wirt of some country inn — an 
impression of baggy, ill-fitting trousers, of a garish tie, 
of a hat that belonged not to the wearer but to some one 
else. 



THE GERMAN OFFICER 73 

A few paces farther on, meeting a groom, I inquired 
for the Herr Sattel-Meister, and was told that I had just 
passed him, and turning round, discovered him in the 
man of the ill-fitting suit, looking hopelessly vulgarized 
and common, all the smartness and air of self-approval 
totally vanished. No wonder the German clings, in 
season and out of season, to his uniform. He is well 
advised to do so. Even the Emperor himself loses much 
of his fine appearance when he wears mufti. 

The sons of the Kaiser upon reaching military age 
always had a young officer assigned to their service as 
adjutant, who also fulfilled the duties of a gentleman- 
in-waiting and general companion. 

They were for the most part very agreeable, well- 
bred young men. Of one of them, Count Fink von 
Finkenstein, I have very agreeable recollections. He 
was the friend and companion of Prince Oskar of Prussia, 
was short, slim and light-haired, and talked with an 
amusing and attractive lisp. He was very game and 
plucky, fond of sport, full of unconscious humour and 
good nature. His tales of the adventures of the Prince 
and himself when at manoeuvres they were ein-guartiert 
with the pastor of the village, and his descriptions of the 
agonized efforts of the Pastor-frau and her daughters to 
rise to the heights of what those simple souls imagined 
to be Court etiquette, used to send the Princess into fits 
of laughter. 

Here may fittingly be interpolated the fact that the 
Ein-guartierung of the officers of the army frequently 



74 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

leads to gratifying matrimonial results, and is a means of 
ensuring that maidens living in out-of-the-way portions 
of the empire may have an opportunity of meeting the 
young lieutenants of their dreams. Not but what the 
marriages of lieutenants are hedged about with many 
restrictions, of which more anon. 

Another adjutant of one of the Princes was young 
Lieutenant von Mackensen, son of the Colonel of the 
Danzig Death's-Head Hussars, who, as General von 
Mackensen, later was appointed to command the German 
army sent against the Russians in the East. Young 
Mackensen was stalwart and handsome, exactly like his 
father, and they both showed in their features the traces 
of their Scottish ancestry, being descendants of a certain 
Mackenzie who many years ago settled in West Prussia. 

Officers old and young came to the Royal table, and 
made on the whole a pleasant impression, especially 
those who had been abroad and rubbed off some of their 
angles against those of other nations. Of one I have a 
particularly vivid recollection, though I have forgotten 
his name ; but he had lately been in China, had experi- 
enced British hospitality in many places abroad, and was 
an enthusiast for England and English ways. I had, 
after several years' residence at Court, been obliged 
to recognize that there was a certain veiled dislike of 
England in the atmosphere, a subtle resentment coupled 
with a good deal of contempt, which was always more 
marked, I noticed, in those men who knew least about 
the British Empire. But this officer was of that kindly, 




THE GERMAN CROWN PRINCE 



THE GERMAN OFFICER 75 

tolerant, unprejudiced mind which is so rare and so 
delightful. He had insight and understanding, and his 
thoughts did not run in predestined grooves. We 
laughed together over English weaknesses, and he laid 
an appreciative finger on some of the sources of England's 
strength. He was sympathetic to our attitude of mind, 
and his criticisms were as kindly as they were convincing. 
He had that judicial faculty of mind which seems rather 
rare in Germany, where each person conceives it a sacred 
duty to put on the blinkers of a somewhat narrow 
patriotism which scarcely admits the right of other 
nations to have any patriotism of their own. But he was 
a notable exception. Most of the other officers with 
whom I discussed England and English ways seemed 
always biased by prepossessions and often by quite 
wrong ideas. They appeared to judge England by a 
standard that might have suited her fifty years ago. 
I was constantly puzzled at their assertions, which 
seemed so hopelessly out of date. The English Sunday 
was a stock subject for their animadversions, and some 
of them described to me weird experiences in London 
lodgings which they appeared to think represented the 
normal English existence. I had great difficulty in 
making some of them understand that the stage-coaches 
described in Dickens played a different part in the 
national life to those for example driven by the late 
Mr. Vanderbilt from London to Brighton. They most 
of them seemed incapable of understanding an interest 
in coaching for its own sake. They wanted to know 



76 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

what was the use of coaching — of what benefit to the 
individual or State ? 

They struck one for the most part, in spite of their 
intellectuality, as having the cramped vision of men of 
narrow means and narrow experiences. They seemed 
also to have somewhat the same kind of unworthy 
jealousies, and to be envious of a people whom they 
held to be intrinsically inferior to themselves, but who 
by good luck had obtained a position which they did 
not deserve. This attitude of mind was not so easily 
discoverable among the higher commercial classes, whose 
business intercourse with the English perhaps taught 
them a more just appreciation of our faults and virtues. 
Among these latter, too, prevailed a more thoughtful and 
cultured cast of mind, inspired by broader views and 
finer, keener insight. 

The mind of the officer seems to develop in one 
direction only, to be obsessed by one desire, and as he 
associates chiefly with officers, as he occupies the chief 
social rank in the empire regardless of his possible lack 
of genuine social qualifications, he is apt to be blind to 
his own limitations and to be conscious of a superiority 
which he really does not possess. He is by the laws 
and customs of the land so absolutely above and beyond 
criticism that he is apt to believe that there is nothing 
in him to criticize. 

Yet it was a former German officer, an ardent ad- 
mirer of the German Emperor and the German Army, 
who in the year 1904 ventured to write a book pointing 



THE GERMAN OFFICER 77 

out some of its gravest defects and the terrible lack of 
moral tone among its officers. He laid great stress upon 
the existence of much overt brutality and ill-treatment 
of soldiers, not only by the non-commissioned officers 
but also by ill-tempered, drunken young lieutenants, 
who cruelly abused their position of authority and the 
private soldier's helplessness in the matter of self- 
justification. 

He pointed out the low level of mental and moral 
culture of many officers and their failure to estimate the 
civilian classes at their full worth, and he unflinchingly 
pointed out the German officer's weakest spot — a false 
and exaggerated sense of his own importance. 

He also drew attention to the well-known fact that 
many of them, owing to the smallness of their pay and 
the increasing luxury of living, are often hopelessly in 
debt — giving rise to conditions which are morally 
debasing and often end in deplorable scandals. 

None of the military abuses which he pointed out 
and ardently desired to see reformed have ever been 
denied by the Germans themselves, and though the book 
was of course " suppressed " by the Government, yet 
everybody in Germany read it. It is quite easy to 
obtain copies of " suppressed " books, and as a rule the 
suppression greatly stimulates the sale. I have in 
Berlin seen notices in booksellers' windows that all 
" forbidden " books might be obtained within on 
inquiry. If copies are exhibited in the window, they 
are liable to confiscation by the police. 



?8 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

In Germany young lieutenants are not allowed to 
marry without the permission of their Colonel, or they 
must leave the army, and permission is only given when 
the lieutenant's private income combined with that of 
his promised bride reaches a sum considerably higher 
than his pay, but even then rather narrow means on 
which to live. There was once an impecunious young 
officer who had the luck to meet a wealthy heiress, and 
they fell mutually in love. When he approached his 
Colonel to inform him of the engagement and at the 
same time obtain permission for his immediate marriage, 
his superior officer inquired anxiously as to the portion 
which the bride — whose name conveyed nothing to him, 
it being as common as Schmidt or Miiller — could con- 
tribute towards the exchequer. 

" Ach ! mein Colonel," answered the young man 
boldly, " she has more money in a week than you 
and I get in a whole year." A statement which 
the Colonel subsequently found to be in no way 
exaggerated. 

But all young officers are not so lucky, and frequently 
they are in desperate straits for money, and cannot find 
in an ordinary way the lady of their dreams — she who 
will be lovely, docile, and domestically inclined, while 
possessing the indispensable snug little fortune. 

So since the demand naturally creates the supply, 
the profession of marriage-broker, both amateur and 
professional, is largely in evidence in Germany. The 
Sunday newspapers especially are full of naive matri- 



THE GERMAN OFFICER 79 

monial advertisements — the gentleman bringing social 
position, family, and " unblemished record," while the 
lady's chief qualification for matrimony must be the 
possession of at least £5000. 

Even the Emperor himself does not disdain to assist 
impecunious but otherwise excellent officers in finding 
a rich bride, often overriding family objections with a 
certain Napoleonic arbitrariness ; and one of his adjutants 
had to thank His Majesty for clearing away difficulties 
in the way of obtaining the lady of his choice, the 
daughter of very wealthy parents who had cherished 
other views for her future. The marriage, however, turned 
out very happily — chiefly, said ill-natured opponents of 
it, because the husband was always away from home 
travelling in the suite of the Emperor. But it is notorious 
that " arranged " marriages often do turn out perhaps 
a good deal more successfully than those inspired entirely 
by love. 

One trait among German officers was the intense 
and enduring hatred, especially of the younger officers, 
towards France and Frenchmen generally. This dislike, 
instead of being extinguished with time, appeared to 
develop and increase, and the abuse constantly showered 
upon the French seemed hardly to be worthy of one 
great nation towards a gallant but unfortunate foe 
who, in 1 870-1, had paid the bitter price of defeat and, 
one would have thought, might have been conciliated 
with immense advantage to Germany herself. But con- 
ciliation seems to find no foothold in German schemes of 



80 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

statesmanship. They appear to consider it synonymous 
with weakness. 

The Emperor in this respect is no better than his 
youngest, most pig-headed and least sagacious officer. 
He prefers the " mailed fist " rather than the iron hand 
under the silken glove. Soft words, perhaps, but hard 
deeds. 

Once, on the occasion of unveiling a monument to 
the German and French soldiers who had fallen on the 
battle-field, the many German people who regretted the 
long estrangement from France made a great effort "to 
express that regret, and conciliatory speeches were made, 
German and Frenchman stood side by side at the grave 
of their common dead who had perished together on the 
field of battle long ago, and there was hope of a changed 
feeling, of a mutual desire to bury national animosities, 
to no longer let the future be mortgaged to the memory 
of the past. The Emperor himself was present at the 
ceremony, and paid a fitting tribute to the valour of the 
men of both nations. It was not much, but it was a 
beginning, the germ it might have been, of something 
more generous and liberal in the German attitude, and 
many Germans among the civilian classes, those who 
had minds of sufficient independence of thought to 
abandon the stereotyped, narrowly patriotic view of 
things, were glad that at last there seemed a likelihood 
of the long-desired rapprochement. 

" What have we not lost in all these years," remarked 
to me one lady, " by having to hold aloof from all that is 



THE GERMAN OFFICER 81 

implied in French culture — by not being able to freely 
mix with the French people, so clever and original as 
they are ? It has destroyed the proper balance of the 
German mind." 

But the Emperor, alas ! seemed to have no desire to 
assist, as he so easily might have done, at this attempt 
at reconciliation. It is true that he always treated 
French people whom he met with the greatest affability, 
and exercised upon them all the undeniable charm of 
character which he possesses ; but he never permitted 
the German people to forget for a moment that France 
was the old hereditary enemy. Only a few days after 
returning from the above-mentioned unveiling of the 
monument to French and German warriors, he told at 
table an incident of the war which an old German officer 
had related to him, where some demoralized French 
soldiers had surrendered themselves to an inferior 
number of Germans — a not uncommon incident, I believe, 
in warfare, and one which the Germans themselves have 
also experienced. It was a quite unimportant occur- 
rence, having no special bearing on any great event of 
the war. The Emperor, however, could not contain 
his delight at hearing the story, and declared his in- 
tention of commissioning one of the Court painters to 
make " the glorious achievement " the subject of an oil- 
painting which should then be hung in the mess-room 
of the regiment to whom, forty odd years before, these 
Frenchmen had surrendered. 

None of the courtiers at the table seemed to be im- 
6 



82 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

pressed by the Emperor's idea. They obviously con- 
sidered it vain and puerile, but he himself continued to 
talk gaily of the Kerls as he called the Frenchmen, 
describing their surrender with picturesque diction 
and an absolute certainty of detail, which somehow gave 
the impression, so vivid are the Emperor's descriptive 
powers, that he had himself been present on the occasion 
and seen the. whole incident from start to finish. 



CHAPTER VI 
GERMAN EDUCATION 

THE German parent, unlike the average English 
one, is anxious that his child should go willingly 
to school and work extremely hard while 
there. Both girls and boys possess a stimulus to 
exertion, a prize to be won quite apart from other 
academic prizes — the boys in their exemption, if they 
come up to the necessary educational standard, from 
more than one year of military service, while the girls 
are equally ambitious, from other but no less inspiring 
motives. In Germany, marriage has, so to speak, to be 
earned by the woman. On her falls the duty of furnish- 
ing and equipping the house — a custom which has many 
advantages. It is an encouragement to thrift and 
industry, for even the poorest maid-servant struggles 
to save, and nearly always does save, the thirty pounds 
which is reckoned the minimum sum upon which even 
the most modest household can be launched. Naturally, 
this sum increases in ratio to the social position occupied 
by the girl. If, for any reason, the marriage is afterwards 
dissolved — and divorce in Germany is granted for com- 
paratively trivial causes, incompatibility of temper, 

83 



84 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

mutual antipathy, and in one instance that I know of 
the fact that the wife boxed the husband's ears (he was, 
it is true, an officer) are held to be sufficient grounds 
for allowing them to permanently separate — the house- 
hold furniture naturally remains the property of the 
wife. 

When I was living in the New Palace, an elderly 
woman who was servant there told me with a certain 
pleasure that her daughter, who had made an un- 
fortunate marriage with a handsome but brutal man, 
who was selfish and cruel, and abominably ill-treated 
his wife and child, had taken the opportunity of the 
husband's absence to remove all the furniture from the 
flat where they had led a very unhappy life together in 
Berlin, and sent it to her mother in Potsdam, with whom 
in the future she had decided to make her home. 

Thinking of the English law on such matters, I asked 
if there was not some danger that this step might get 
her daughter into trouble. 

" Ach ! no," she replied, quite surprised at the idea. 
" The furniture belongs to my daughter. She bought it 
all before she married — earned every penny of it. He's 
got nothing to do with it. It will be a great surprise for 
him — that brute ! — a nice Ueber-raschung, won't it ? 
But he deserves it all. She had to do it when he was 
away, or he would have beaten her. It was her only 
chance. But it's her furniture. She was years and 
years working hard for it. And then to marry such 
a Kef I, who can't keep his hands off her and the child ! " 



GERMAN EDUCATION 85 

Once I stayed a few weeks in Plon, so as to give some 
English lessons to Prince Joachim of Prussia, who was a 
student there. My lodgings were in a big house in the 
village, which, excepting for my bedroom and a kitchen 
in the basement, was totally unfurnished. But one day 
the young lieutenant who held the position of governor 
to the Prince — not the same one I had known at the 
New Palace, but a comparative stranger — took me 
aside, and confiding to me the fact that in a month he 
hoped to be married, and was going to occupy two 
floors of the house where I lodged, asked if it would in- 
convenience me at all if the furniture was brought in, 
as his Braut had already bought it all, and how nice 
it would be if it could be sent in and unpacked at once. 

Of course I was very pleased at the idea of having 
the echoing empty rooms furnished and made home-like, 
and in a few days' time enormous wooden packing-cases 
began to arrive, which the lieutenant and two or three 
soldier-servants spent all their spare time in opening 
on the bit of untidy grass-plot before the drawing-room 
windows, where a couple of long-legged, unpruned rose- 
bushes, in a vague and sketchy bed in the middle, waved 
incessantly to and fro, as though appealing for a stake 
to which to attach themselves. Front gardens in Ger- 
many are often rather neglected, and this was one of 
the most dishevelled I had ever seen, especially after the 
packing-cases had arrived and been wrenched open. 

The furniture that emerged was very handsome 
and obviously rather costly, but what struck me most 



86 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

about it was its massiveness and consequent unsuita- 
bility to the career of a young soldier, who in the natural 
course of events must be continually moving from place 
to place. The dining-room sideboard was monumental 
in size and ornamented with most elaborate and heavy 
carving, which would need the constant attention of a 
housemaid to keep it in proper condition. Then there 
were enormous plush sofas and arm-chairs, a dining- 
table of mediaeval appearance with plethoric legs which 
swelled out bulbously in the middle, and quantities of 
other furniture, including a grand piano, of such a weight 
and solidity that one wondered how the lieutenant and 
his soldiers had managed to drag them up the stairs to 
the first floor. 

When everything was arranged — the heavy portieres 
and plush curtains hung up by the upholsterer from Kiel, 
the carpet squares laid down in the middle of the painted 
floors, the pictures (landscapes in the drawing-room, 
engravings in the dining-room, all framed in black oak) 
suspended by the lieutenant himself from the hooks on 
the walls with much measuring and anxiety — the happy 
Brdutigam, full of pride in his handiwork, took me round 
to admire the effect. He had really arranged everything 
very well, and I was able genuinely to praise all that he 
had done and find it very good — which is what all lords 
of creation like. He told me that his Braut was the 
daughter of an architect and had therefore very superior 
taste, and when I asked him if he was not afraid of her 
lovely furniture being spoiled when he should have to 



GERMAN EDUCATION 87 

move from Plon, he only sighed and said that his Braut 
had chosen very solid furniture on that account, the 
constant moving being very injurious to goods of slighter 
quality. 

It seemed to me an extremely judicious matrimonial 
partnership — that the young man should supply the 
larger share at least of the income to keep up the home, 
while the woman provided the home itself ; and it cer- 
tainly simplifies the matrimonial problem to a great 
extent, relieving the husband of the necessity of spending 
a large sum of money in furnishing at a time when he 
has other expenses of matrimony to face. 

So that every girl in Germany, with the exception of 
those born of rich parents, has an intense desire for 
education. Very early in life is impressed upon her 
plastic mind the fact that by it alone will she be in a 
position to earn the necessary money for her Aus-steuer, 
and that even if her parents are able to give her a sum 
of money, yet the more she can assist them to save, 
the better will her chances in life be of obtaining a prize 
in the matrimonial market. And in Germany, as in 
England some fifty years back, the chief avenue of 
employment for women is teaching ; for even nowadays 
German girls of good family would be horrified at the 
idea of going on the stage, training as gardeners, dairy- 
women, or agriculturists. A few have struck out for 
themselves as photographers, bookbinders, or clerks, and 
as of old, Art and Literature claim a good percentage ; 
but the majority of German girls take the road of least 



88 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

resistance and qualify as teachers, and make with certain 
limitations very excellent ones — so excellent that I was 
always surprised that they were not allowed a more 
prominent and authoritative position in educational 
affairs. 

All German children at a very early age are inspired 
by a spirit of hard work. They must learn to rise early ; 
for German schools open at seven o'clock in summer- 
time and eight in winter, finishing, excepting for special 
subjects, at one o'clock. In the brown or black canvas 
satchel with which every child is equipped, is placed 
every morning along with the books which have been 
used for home study, a substantial Butter-Brodchen, which 
is eaten at half-past ten in a half-hour's pause which is 
allowed for the purpose of rest and recreation. 

As a rule, all German children attend day-schools 
or have a teacher at home. The boys for the most part, 
until they go to the University, remain with their parents 
in the intervals of learning. It is one of the drawbacks 
of German schools, that outside the knowledge which the 
pupils acquire — and no one has ever denied the thorough- 
ness and intelligence with which learning is imparted in 
Germany — they have so little influence upon the inner 
life of the pupil. The teachers are often mere pedagogues, 
and the pupils receive from them no inspiration, if we 
except — and it is a great exception — that ardent culti- 
vation of patriotism which, since the founding of the 
German Empire in 1871, has been one of the chief 
means of uniting and consolidating the various different 



GERMAN EDUCATION 89 

states of which it is formed. No country in the world 
possesses such a mass of patriotic songs and poetry as 
Germany. Many of them were born of times of terrible 
stress and struggle. There are the writings of the 
warrior-poet Korner, breathing the pure flame of self- 
sacrifice and love of country. He was a soldier of the 
Freiheits-Krieg, or War of Liberation, and died fighting 
against Napoleon. Hundreds of other poems and war- 
songs are learned by German school-children, not for- 
getting those of Walter von der Vogelweide, the most 
celebrated German poet of the Middle Ages, who out- 
shone all his rivals at the great contest of Minnesingers 
at the Wartburg, and wrote a poem which is the proto- 
type of " Deutschland uber Alles," wherein he praises 
everything German, especially German women. Like 
later Germans, his poetry was largely inspired by politics, 
and his verse exercised a great influence on public feeling. 
A fine war-hymn of three verses, wedded to simple 
if monotonous music, is one born also of the troubled 
times of the Napoleonic Wars. With its double rhythm 
and ponderous rolling harmonies, it stirs even in the 
breasts of strangers hearing it for the first time a 
marvellous thrill and enthusiasm : 

" Wir treten zum Beten, vor Gott den Gerechten 
Er haltet und waltet ein strenges Gerecht 
Er lasst von den Schlechten, nicht die Guten Knechten, 
Sein Name sei gelobt, er vergisst unser nicht." 

Every child learns to sing it in school, it is taught in 
barracks to every soldier, it is heard at every church 



go MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

parade, and in the Royal Chapel, accompanied by the 
shrill sound of trumpets, is invariably sung at the great 
anniversaries, such as the Emperor's birthday and 
Ordensfest. It has been heard on every battle-field since 
the Great War broke out. 

I have often wished that in England we had some 
similar war-hymn in which we too might breathe out the 
soul of our national aspirations, something untouched 
by music-halls or the desire to make money — words and 
music which would crystallize the thoughts that stir 
and inspire us, and give them a worthy channel in which 
to find outlet and expression. 

The handmaids of Patriotism in all ages have been 
Poetry and Song, and the Germans do not let them sit 
out in the cold with nothing to do. They know that the 
associations of childhood are the strongest and most 
lasting, that the emotions of a people are, in perilous 
times, one of its most valuable national assets, so 
they have not neglected to cultivate and make them 
fruitful. The poorest and the richest child in the 
empire is taught from the same book of verse its duty 
of work and self-sacrifice for the Fatherland. History, 
we know, is in no country taught to children quite as 
one might wish it to be, being too often used to foster 
a rather narrow and sentimental attachment to one's 
own country and its national character. Helene Lange, 
the great reformer of girls' education in Germany, who 
has continually, and often successfully, battled for 
woman's right to be educated widely and to keep her 



GERMAN EDUCATION 91 

education from being entirely controlled as formerly by 
men, has frequently pointed out the danger of this blind 
and antiquated method. She has earnestly pleaded 
that instead of concentrating attention only on dates 
and events, history should help pupils to understand 
the process and development of civilization, and the 
economic conditions which, rather than the wars of past 
ages, change the history of the world. 

State girls' schools in Germany are all controlled by 
men, and only in comparatively recent years have 
women been allowed to take any active part in teaching 
the higher classes. It is an everyday sight in Berlin 
to see a long procession of little girls taking the air 
under the leadership of a be-spectacled young man, who 
will take them to the Sieges-Allee, and before the statues 
of former German rulers give them a short lecture on 
German history, on lines above mentioned. From the 
windows of my bedroom in Berlin Schloss, which over- 
looked the colossal statue of William the First, day 
after day I used to see streams of small children climbing 
the steps up to the broad pediment on which the statue 
was placed, and listen to the raucous voices of various 
young men who proclaimed the manifold virtues and 
achievements of the Old Emperor. Occasionally, if 
the classes were very large, a second female teacher 
accompanied him; but she never was allowed to give 
the lecture, or to do anything but hustle the children 
across the street, and see that they lined up in rank 
on the opposite side. 



92 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

The Empress and many of the ladies of her Court 
have sympathized with the desire of women to have 
more complete control of the education of girls, but 
all the same the education of the only daughter of the 
Empress was, from the very beginning, entrusted to 
masculine minds. As soon as she could read, an old 
tutor of very moderate abilities was appointed to take 
in hand her education, and her German governess was 
supposed to interfere in it no further than to uphold 
the tutor's efforts on every occasion. Later on, the 
Princess had other tutors, all of a type very common in 
Germany — learned men of orderly minds full of inter- 
esting information, capable of acquiring knowledge of 
anything necessary within two or three days. 

I remember once when the Princess, then aged about 
fourteen, was going to pay a private visit to Copenhagen. 
The day before she was to start, her tutor gave her a 
lecture on the Danish capital, at which I was present. 
He knew everything there was to know of that city, as 
though he had been living there for months, though as 
a matter of fact he had never set foot in it. He described 
its parks and gardens, every noteworthy statue or picture 
in its galleries, with an intimate knowledge that was 
simply astounding. He knew the local history, the 
local traditions ; one almost breathed a Danish atmo- 
sphere and smelt the characteristic smells of the place. 
And in plain, simple, but extremely interesting and 
humorous style he told his story, which in the 
marvellous assimilative German way he had gathered 



GERMAN EDUCATION 93 

together in a few hours from various works on 
Denmark. 

I had many opportunities of observing the German 
tutor as a type and of getting to know him fairly well. 
He always appeared to me, in spite of his undoubted 
qualifications, to be a somewhat unpleasant kind of 
person, possessing many rather despicable traits of 
character. I feel the less chary of saying this because 
I found my sentiments in this matter shared to a great 
extent by the Germans themselves. They all with one 
accord had great respect for the learning but little for 
the personal character of those various instructors of 
youth who came within my sphere of observation. They 
themselves described them to me as being weak in 
character, eager to curry favour, unrefined in their 
personal habits, and very easily piquiert. And my 
own personal experience corroborated what I heard. 
They were indeed, many of these learned Professoren, 
of a childishly uncontrolled and easily wounded vanity, 
quickly offended, susceptible to the grossest flattery, 
and anxious to impose themselves upon the world as 
superior beings. They had all that ridiculous pre- 
tentiousness which children so quickly perceive and 
despise. 

I have one man in memory, of undoubted great 
ability as a teacher, who when he gave a lecture in history 
or geography to the Princess and the little girls who 
were her fellow-students and suspected the slightest 
inattention in his pupils, would stop suddenly, and like 



94 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

Simon Tappertit, proceed to " eye over " the four 
demure little damsels who sat in a row before him, 
concentrating into his gaze what he no doubt believed 
to be a Bismarck-sternness calculated to make the 
stoutest maiden-heart quail. He at the same time 
maintained a dead silence for some moments, drawing 
himself up with a theatrically proud air, which, owing 
to his own personal disabilities, entirely failed of its 
intended effect, and waited in silence for his pupils to 
look shame-faced and penitent. The German school- 
girl, brought up from infancy to be docile and do what 
is expected of her, would as a rule respond to these 
tactics by outward signs of contrition, either genuine 
or assumed, some of a nervous disposition might even 
be moved to tears, upon which the teacher, placated and 
satisfied at these signs of his power, after a suitable 
admonition would proceed with his teaching. 

The Princess and her fellow-schoolgirls for a time 
adhered to the orthodox attitude of penitence, though 
privately the former, who had lately made the acquaint- 
ance of an American girl and learned from her among 
other things the "cake-walk" and various flowers of 
American speech, thought that Herr Muller's " Bismarck- 
stunts," as she was pleased to call them, were rather 
ridiculous and misplaced, as indeed they were. Then 
one day Prince Oskar, at that time a student of Bonn 
University, being at home for a few days, thought well 
to give his young sister some advice. He was prodigal 
of counsel was Prince Oskar, but it was usually of a 



GERMAN EDUCATION 95 

very practical and sensible kind, and, unlike most advice, 
gratefully received and laid to heart by its recipient. 
The gist of Prince Oskar's admonition, as far as I could 
gather at second-hand from the Princess herself, was to 
the effect that a scholar must never allow herself to be 
unduly imposed upon by a teacher's apparent infalli- 
bility, nor accept his opinions of the intrinsic worth of 
his ideas at his own value ; that she must on all matters 
preserve her own independent judgment, not allowing 
herself to be influenced by personal bias ; and above all 
she must bear in mind that a great deal of what was 
taught in schools had no practical bearing on life, and 
a large proportion not only of Herr Miiller's but other 
professors' instruction was mere " Dummes Zeug" — 
"silly rot." In this strain had Prince Oskar declaimed 
at large, with the effect that on the next occasion when 
the teacher tried to exercise the power of his glance over 
the Princess and her companions, he found his efforts 
ignored. The one " of mildest mood " among the 
pupils, she who usually on these occasions melted into a 
softened frame of mind bedewed by tears, having had her 
morale stiffened by the alternate jeers and encourage- 
ment of the Princess to whom she was passionately 
attached, on encountering the Professor's baleful gaze, 
remained quite unperturbed and cheerful, dropping 
with great presence of mind a pencil on the floor to 
cover any confusion she might feel, while the others 
were absorbed in their own thoughts and sat with smiling 
faces, feeling no doubt inward feminine tremors but 



96 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

none the less battling bravely with their emotions. Two 
of them, including the Princess, after a few moments of 
silence, also dropped pencils and made a great business 
of picking them up again, dragging chairs over the floor, 
and crawling under the table. They remained most 
respectful and cheerful towards the enraged Professor, 
but from that time they ceased to fear him, and being on 
the whole a sensible man, he realized the fact and made 
no further attempts to imponieren. 

The Augusta-Stift, the girls' school in Potsdam 
from among whose pupils were chosen the three com- 
panions of the Princess who shared her studies till the 
last year of her education, was one of the few boarding- 
schools to be found in Germany. Most of these aristo- 
cratic establishments are founded on the sites of ancient 
convents, and at the Reformation were converted to 
their present uses. The families which had given 
lands or other endowments had the right to send 
their daughters to be educated free of charge, and 
these girls, if they remained unmarried, were given a 
suite of rooms in the Stift, together with board and a 
small but sufficient yearly income. The head of the 
community still retained the title of Abtissin, or Abbess, 
and her robes of office approximated closely to the 
conventual garb, although, being a Protestant com- 
munity, no one had to take any vows. As far as an 
outsider could gather of the life in these Stifts, especi- 
ally of that of the schoolgirls educated there, it was of 
an old-fashioned, unprogressive type. Some Stifts were 



GERMAN EDUCATION 97 

so aristocratic that the candidate was not admitted if 
she could not show sixteen quarterings of nobility in 
her family tree. 

Most of the girls were ordinary boarders, paying fees 
as in any other school. They wore uniform, and were 
allowed no responsibility of any kind, but expected to 
be passionately absorbed in their studies and in a 
religious life. They were hedged in by numberless small 
rules and penalties, rather reminding one of Miss Shepherd 
in " David Copperfield," who was " stood in the stocks 
for turning in her toes." 

The Emperor had in his gift the nomination to 
vacancies in several of these Stifts, and one lady who 
had been employed in teaching the Princess was any- 
thing but pleased when she heard that through the 
instrumentality of the ladies of the Court and the 
unexpected death of a Stifts-Dame her future had been 
satisfactorily provided for. 

Secured from financial anxiety she had only to ac- 
cept the vacant place and live happily ever after, with a 
right to two roebucks yearly from the Royal forests 
and other ancient privileges, while she could be usefully 
employed in adding to her slender income by instructing 
the young ladies belonging to the school attached to the 
Stift. But she recoiled in horror at the prospect, — she 
was barely thirty, — and for some time I was in the 
embarrassing position of being called upon to sympathize 
with her desire not to retire from the world of Berlin 
into premature obscurity — most Stifts are situated in 



98 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

remote, picturesque, but inaccessible places — and yet to 
show a becoming appreciation of the noble part played 
by the ladies of the Court in arranging for her, at some 
pains to themselves, such a secure and comfortable 
provision. Being a person of modern tendencies and 
certain maybe quixotic enthusiasms, she was not in the 
least grateful for the dull, monotonous prospect before 
her, and it was only after much misapprehension and some 
very tactful handling of a rather difficult situation that 
she was able to explain at last her desire to postpone for 
a season her withdrawal from the life of the capital. 

The Augusta-Stift, where eighty young maidens of 
the bluest blood in Germany were educated, was a fine 
building, recently rebuilt in a very effective modern 
style, with wide, airy classrooms and corridors. It 
possessed a good gymnasium and a chapel, and was 
considered wonderfully up to date because the girls 
played not only tennis but cricket, which they learned 
from an English teacher. It stood in a pleasant tree- 
shaded corner of Potsdam, not far from one of the lakes, 
and was under the special patronage of the Empress, 
who visited it frequently and took a very warm interest 
in all the pupils. 

The only boarding-schools for boys, something akin 
to our public schools but run on very different lines, 
were the Kadetten-Schulen — cadet schools — where boys 
were educated under semi-military training. Once I 
was allowed, when staying in Plon, to visit the cadet 
school there and to be present while a young officer 



GERMAN EDUCATION 99 

in uniform gave an English lesson. He had spent a 
year in England and could speak fairly fluently, but 
with a very bad accent. The whole lesson was given 
in English. First of all the boys — there were about 
thirty in the class — read aloud a few sentences and the 
teacher asked them questions upon them. Their replies 
were fluent and grammatical, but reflected their teacher's 
bad pronunciation. Everywhere in Germany I noticed 
that girls almost invariably spoke much better English 
than boys, because they learned it from an English 
teacher, while the boys had to be content with a German. 
In the cadet schools the pupils wear a school uniform of 
a military type, and have to stand at attention whenever 
a master speaks to them. They play tennis on an 
asphalt court, but do not appear to go in for any other 
kind of sport, though they do a little boating in the 
summer months. 

I was also permitted to see over the Victoria-Louisen- 
Schule, a secondary school for girls at Charlottenburg, 
one of the finest and most modern in Berlin, with an 
attendance of over one thousand scholars. It was built 
"regardless of expense," and possessed all that one 
could desire in a school — ample space, light, and air. 
The classes were in full swing, and I visited them in 
turn, beginning with the lower ones. Some of the 
younger children were having a French lesson. Under 
the supervision of a teacher they were laying a table 
with doll's tea-things, and as they spread the cloth and 
placed each piece of crockery on the table they described 



ioo MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

in French every successive action as they performed it. 
This association of word and deed appeared to me an 
admirable and practical method of teaching languages. 

Upstairs, another class of older girls of fifteen and 
sixteen were having a lesson in English. Their teacher — 
a woman — spoke our language admirably, with very 
little foreign accent. She was giving a difficult lesson 
on English literature, and never seemed to hesitate for 
a word or to be at fault for want of an expression. 

In the upper corridor of the school were hung some 
very fine reproductions of modern art and excellent 
coloured engravings. The head of the school — of course 
a man — told me that they laid great stress on the 
proper artistic training of children by giving them 
excellent models to look at. He showed me with pride 
his lecture-room equipped with screen, lantern, and 
thousands of mounted specimens. Then he took me 
into a singing class, where he told me the young master 
had just become engaged to one of his pupils — a girl of 
seventeen. 

On the whole, excepting in the matter of languages, 
I could not discover any marked superiority in German 
teaching-methods to those in our best English schools 
of similar type. There are, of course, many private 
schools, but as they are all visited by Government 
inspectors in the same way as the State schools the 
standard is kept high, and I learned that on the whole 
the heads of private schools rather welcome inspection 
than otherwise. Far from being a drawback, it is looked 




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GERMAN ^EDUCATION 101 

upon as a distinct advantage, as the inspector's attitude 
is more that of a sympathizing counsellor than of a harsh 
critic. He welcomes originality of method as long as it 
leads to good results, and if he comes across any useful 
innovation in one school, after it has been tested for some 
months and found to be on the side of progress and 
improvement, he will spread abroad its advantages in 
other schools. To the timid, nervous teacher he is 
naturally something of a nightmare ; but the best in- 
spectors — they are naturally not all on the same level — 
will give many valuable hints to a teacher, and if he is a 
tactful man — which he very often, alas ! is not — will be 
a great stimulus and encouragement to novel methods. 

Even children educated at home under a governess 
or tutor are not exempt from inspection, and those of 
Royalty no less so. While the children of the German 
Emperor were being educated at home, twice a year 
appeared the inspector to assure himself of their proper 
progress ; and when the Princess remained alone, she with 
her three friends still continued to be inspected at 
intervals, and it was amusing to hear of the inward 
tremors and heart-sinkings of the Emperor's daughter 
when she knew such a visit was imminent, and her 
extreme joy when it was over and she felt that she had 
acquitted herself well. 

But, after all, the main reason of the success of the 
excellent German educational system would seem to 
lie chiefly in the fact of the enthusiasm of the nation 
itself for education. Parents are keen to see their 



102 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

children love learning, — not perhaps from entirely dis- 
interested motives, but from a knowledge of its power, — 
and they are of course anxious for their sons to escape 
with one year's military service instead of two. In a 
middle-class family it is considered a terrible disgrace 
for a boy not to get his "remove," and the lamentable 
suicides of boys so frequently to be read of in German 
newspapers can always be traced to some sensitive child's 
inability to be versetzt. I remember a delightful youth, 
Siegfried by name, one of those who, if he had been born 
in England, would have been distinguished in games and 
athletics, and might perhaps later on have made a success- 
ful colonist. He was so charming and good-tempered 
that Prince Joachim was greatly attracted to him, 
and as they were about the same age it was arranged 
that Siegfried should share the Prince's studies and 
afterwards accompany him to Plon. Now, German tutors 
are very abusive — there is no other term for it — to pupils 
who do not come up to the recognized standard of 
proficiency, and poor Siegfried was hopelessly below 
it. He possessed no memory for facts, his mind was 
unable to grapple with the intricacies of Latin grammar, 
and in mathematics he was a hopeless failure. Sunday 
after Sunday the hapless boy had to spend his scanty 
leisure in working, and at last, as his example had not 
the desired stimulating influence on Prince Joachim, he 
was sent away in the deepest disgrace, as though he had 
done something criminal. The Empress was very much 
attached to the boy, who she perceived was an excellent 



GERMAN EDUCATION 103 

manly companion for her own son, whose health had been 
very delicate, keeping him from the usual sports of 
boyhood; but although she pleaded for a longer trial, 
neither tutor nor governor would hear of it, and the boy 
himself was glad to go. He was sent to school, where in 
three months he developed brain fever, and after lying 
dangerously ill for some time recovered, but was for- 
bidden by the doctor to do anything in the way of study 
for over a year and then only for a very short time 
daily. 

The parents were very much depressed at their son's 
failure, and when I suggested the colonies as a sphere for 
Siegfried's undoubted capacities they seemed still more 
depressed. 

As a matter of fact I never heard of any German 
who wanted to settle in German colonies. 

The brother of a German girl I knew, another failure, 
more from want of character than lack of mental ability, 
proposed to go abroad and "try his luck." As he had 
been accustomed to farming, I was surprised to hear from 
his sister that he intended to go to America. 

" But why not to your own colonies ? I hear they 
are so splendid and flourishing. Why doesn't he go to 
South- West Africa ? " I asked. It was at the time when 
Dernburg was Minister for the Colonies and had inspired 
great enthusiasm for the splendid possibilities of German 
colonization. 

She looked a little nonplussed, and made a grimace. 
" Oh, nobody goes to German colonies. They are 



104 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

managed by the Government. Germans who go to 
America do best." 

We all know that German agriculturists emigrating 
to Canada or the States are invariably very industrious 
and successful people. They appear to be largely re- 
cruited from the educational " failures " of Germany. 



CHAPTER VII 
GERMAN WOMANHOOD 

IN Germany, as I have already said, girls without 
money have far less chance of achieving matri- 
mony than in England, where the husband is 
expected to provide for his wife ; so the modern German 
girl, conscious of being greatly in excess of the male 
population, seeks to extend her sphere of activities, 
and is no longer content to be merely a good Haus-frau 
and to learn seventeen different ways of making sausages. 
It is true that girls brought up on estates in the country 
may still have to superintend the rites attendant on the 
yearly pig-killing, and I remember one of the ladies of 
the Court, a young countess belonging to an old and 
honoured German family, congratulating herself on 
becoming engaged to a naval officer because she would 
not, as might have been the case if she had married a 
landed proprietor, be required to supervise various house- 
hold tasks, such as the smoking of goose-breasts, hams 
and bacon, the making of various kinds of those large 
and succulent sausages above-mentioned, pickling of 
tongues and Schweine-fleisch, preparation of Apfel and 

Pflaumen-mus, and multifarious other tasks, of which 

105 



106 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

she confessed herself completely ignorant, yet was 
prepared, in case of necessity, to acquire the art and 
unflinchingly perform. I made further inquiries from a 
girl, born and bred in a remote district of Pomerania, 
as to the actual work which the mistress of a German 
country-house was expected to do. 

" Do you actually find it necessary to cut up sausage- 
meat ? " I asked. " I always thought that German 
servants were so excellent — prepared to do anything, 
and to work so much harder than ours in England." 

" Yes, they do," was the answer ; " but of course they 
need supervision, and my mother and I weigh out all the 
sausage-meat for them, and have to be there all the time 
to see that they do it properly. We don't actually cut 
up the sausage-meat, but we do the mixing — you know 
it has to be mixed in various ways. There's Leber- 

Wurst and Blut-Wurst " Here I shuddered, and 

was only saved from condemning German methods on 
recollecting how our own English " black-puddings " 
are made. 

The mother of this girl was a refined, cultivated woman, 
who spoke excellent English and French, and retained a 
delightful, old-fashioned, kindly outlook on the world 
and its affairs. The charming and intellectual wife of 
a learned Professor I knew, a great art-critic and writer, 
would often tell me that she had been busy helping her 
two maids to hang out the washing or make the bedrooms 
tidy ; but I noticed that her daughters — she had four — 
were supremely ignorant of everything pertaining to 



GERMAN WOMANHOOD 107 

household matters, in which they were not in the least 
interested, being absorbed in various branches of study 
and very anxious to make careers for themselves. The 
German " daughter " of to-day is no longer brought 
up on the same lines as her mother. Everywhere I 
was told that household management was becoming a 
thing of the past, that restaurants and a love of leisure 
were undermining all the good old German ways, that 
girls preferred to train as doctors or dentists or even 
chemists, that they wanted to be factory-inspectors 
rather than cooks and domestic purveyors of home- 
comforts. 

The German ideal of woman is, as we know, of a 
being who entwines heavenly roses in the earthly lives of 
her mankind, and exercises a softening but strictly sub- 
ordinate role in his existence. Her one desire should be, 
not a misguided longing for knowledge and culture, or 
a broadening of the sphere of her activities, but devotion 
and self-sacrifice for the sake of her husband and chil- 
dren ; and as a rule the German woman, when she is 
married, is content to fill the role assigned her, and, 
like women of many other nations, find her happiness 
in the limited sphere of home. It is quite likely that 
in that case she will, if living in an out-of-the-way spot, 
undertake a great part of her children's education. I 
remember finding one such mother, a very pretty, alert 
young woman married to a rather uninteresting husband, 
whose home was away in the big forests in East Prussia 
on the Russian frontier. She had taught her little boys 



108 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

to speak and read English, and when I met her she had 
just introduced into their household an English gover- 
ness who was to carry on the work the mother had 
begun. Talking of English governesses in German 
households, I was often surprised to find what very- 
ignorant young women were filling these posts — girls 
whose grammar and pronunciation were faulty, and 
knowledge of English history and literature almost 
non-existent. 

" English governesses are so frightfully ignorant," 
said a clever German woman to me one day. " They 
haven't an idea when the Wars of the Roses happened, 
or who Simon de Montfort was, and as for knowing 
anything about Frederick the Great and Queen 
Louise " 

I tried to excuse the ignorance of English governesses 
by pointing out to her that many English girls, with 
very little knowledge excepting of their own language, 
came to Germany with the fond belief that they would 
immediately be taken into a wealthy family, paid a 
high salary, and treated as a dear and intimate friend. 
The more ignorant and unsophisticated, the more ready 
were they to believe that the Germans would welcome 
them with open arms, and the Germans on their side 
often showed little discrimination and appeared to think 
that any Englishwoman was good enough to teach her 
own language, especially as they were prepared to pay 
the smallest possible salary and put her to sleep in a 
room which in England we should call a cupboard. The 



GERMAN -WOMANHOOD 109 

better-educated English college girl rarely comes to 
Germany to teach, unlike the German girl of noble birth 
who is only too delighted to spend a year or two in Eng- 
land enjoying a salary which she could never hope for 
in her native land, beside the added prestige which all 
teachers gain who have resided in a foreign country. 

In the German secondary schools every teacher of 
languages must have lived for at least a year in the 
country whose tongue she teaches and be able to con- 
verse fluently in English or French. Languages in 
Germany are taught to girls primarily with the idea 
that they shall be able to talk in them, not, as in England, 
with a view to passing a complicated written examina- 
tion, wherein, as one victim plaintively remarked, " one 
learns a lot of rot about the proper employment of the 
subjunctive and can't ask a French taxi-driver how much 
his fare is to Longchamps — or if you do manage it, then 
his answer is quite incomprehensible. Languages were 
meant to be talked before they were written. I can 
spell in French beautifully, but cabmen and porters 
are so silly, they won't stop and spell the words for us 
— I wish they would, then I should be all right." 

The daughter of the Kastellan, or caretaker, of the 
portion of Berlin Schloss in which I lived in the 
winter-time when the Court was at Berlin always spoke 
to me in English when we met on the stairs. She had 
learned it in a secondary school and her accent was 
excellent. 

A trait which has struck every one who has had much 



no MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

to do with Germans is the keenness with which they take 
every opportunity of practising foreign languages. 
An English girl living in a German family will often 
find it very difficult to learn any German at all, so eager 
is every member to talk English with her. But German 
tutors and schoolmasters and the majority of the young 
German officers I met could speak no English at all, and 
usually apologized for the fact by saying that they knew 
French ; but I noticed that when the opportunity of 
talking French arose they were equally incapable of 
speaking it. It was obvious that languages were less 
well taught in boys' schools. And, as a matter of fact, 
one soon perceived that in Germany women-teachers 
were recruited from a higher social class than the corre- 
sponding men-teachers ; were better bred, possessed of 
finer, more tactful feelings, had assimilated more of the 
true inward spirit of culture, and consequently, on the 
whole, were of broader, more tolerant views. I never 
have been able to understand the preference, so marked 
in Germany, for the man-teacher over the woman- 
teacher, for those women-teachers I had the privilege 
of knowing were pre-eminently well trained and well 
equipped for the work they had to do, and very sym- 
pathetic and tactful in handling their pupils, an absolute 
contrast to the German Frdulein of our childhood's 
days. 

I suppose English teachers in Germany are liable to 
rather acute criticism, because a few years ago I received 
a book from a young German author, in which the chief 



GERMAN WOMANHOOD in 

characteristic of the English governess of the family 
in the story was a perpetual questioning of the children, 
at the most inopportune moments, as to whether they 
had attended properly to the details of their toilet. 
What made this trait the more painful was the fact 
that the hero of the tale — a boy of nine or ten — was 
of a dreamy, poetic temperament, and when he was im- 
mersed in a tender reverie (German boys, it appears, are 
frequently of this type), his mental vision fixed on the 
glittering of sunshine in the pine-trees, and the dimple 
of the waters of the lake beyond, a harsh voice would 
break into his daydream, asking, " Did you remember 
to brush your teeth this morning, Hermann ? " and his 
picture for the time being was rudely shattered. 

The German women that one meets in the street 
among the ponderous crowds that move with slow, 
sauntering deliberation up and down the Linden on 
Sundays, hoping for a glimpse of their beloved Kaiser, 
strike one as being all much of the same type — rather 
heavy in feature, fleshy in substance, and ill-dressed. 
Their children are clad in tartan-patterned materials 
of ugly design, and the mothers themselves seem as 
though with matrimony they had for ever cast aside any 
attempt to preserve their appearance. They are dressed 
neatly, — one rarely sees an untidy German woman, 
— but with no obvious desire to look their best ; and they 
cling desperately to the same fashions for years. If 
you want to see smartly-dressed German women, you will 
find them at the races ; but as a rule they do not trouble 



ii2 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

themselves much about style and cut. The Empress, 
like our own Queen Mary, is conservative in her tastes ; 
and though the young married Princesses, especially 
the Crown Princess, are very anxious to be up to date in 
style, any extreme is frowned upon at Court, where certain 
rules are laid down which may not be infringed. On 
my last visit to Germany, at the time of the wedding 
of the Emperor's daughter in May 1913, everybody at 
Court was wearing their hair in the fashion of four years 
before, combed straight up off the forehead and rolled 
over a wire frame, which we in England had discarded 
some time. 

German women of the poorer classes in the country 
do an enormous amount of agricultural work. Not 
only in the remoter districts of East and West Prussia 
may they be seen toiling in the fields by hundreds, but 
also in the outskirts of Berlin and Potsdam, where they 
do the greater part of the field-work. The soil in 
Northern Germany is excessively light and sandy, and 
enormous crops of potatoes are grown, which are planted 
and tended almost entirely by women, though men do 
the ploughing and preliminary cultivation of the land. 
They are paid somewhere about the rate of threepence 
or fourpence a day, are clothed in neat if faded print 
dresses, and to keep off the sun each one wears a bright 
handkerchief bound round the head. Going and coming 
from work, they wear knitted stockings and wooden 
shoes, but prefer to be barefoot in the fields. Excepting 
for the smallness of their pay, they seem to need little 



GERMAN WOMANHOOD 113 

pity ; for the work is not hard, they are out in the fresh 
air and sunshine among the trees, they chatter inces- 
santly as they hoe and dig, and appear to take things in a 
leisurely way. Standing all day at the wash-tub cannot 
be half such pleasant work, though it is probably better 
paid. The women who used to come with the coal- 
carts to the New Palace, helping to unload them, seemed 
altogether in another category. They were of a more 
dirty, degraded type, and one felt sorry for them when 
the rain came down and the wind tore at the scanty grey 
locks that escaped from the red handkerchiefs they wore 
tied tightly round their heads. They had a crushed, 
brutalized appearance, and were never seen to smile 
like the potato-women did. They gazed with a look of 
sour disapproval and dislike at the consequential footmen 
passing to and fro in the Hof, and appeared somewhat 
akin to the lean, puny, over-worked horses that drew 
the carts — women without hope or enjoyment in life. 

In the gardens of the Palace scores of women were 
employed to weed and brush the paths, especially in the 
autumn when the leaves were falling. They dragged a 
little hand-cart about with them, into which they loaded 
the dead leaves and blown-off branches. They worked 
in bands, sweeping methodically, eight or ten together, 
leaving the marks, of their long thin besoms on the sand 
of which all the garden- walks of the Palace were made, 
as gravel is very scarce in the neighbourhood, while the 
sand is cheap and soon dries, is easily raked over once 
a day, and close at hand, being indeed the chief con- 



Ii4 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

stituent of the soil of the Mark Brandenburg, which has 
been called " the sand-box of Europe." Women also 
were employed all through the winter to carry fuel into 
the different apartments of the Palace. They too had 
on their heads the usual picturesque practical peasant 
head-dress, the bright cotton handkerchief so universally 
worn on the Continent, and they padded up and down 
the staircases in their soft felt shoes, carrying on their 
backs enormous deep baskets fitted with straps over the 
shoulders, and filled with the short pine-logs which were 
burnt in all the cheery big open fireplaces or the chocolate 
or white porcelain stoves which rise monumentally in the 
corner of every German apartment. 

One German lady, who had lived for years in the 
Royal Schloss in Berlin, once had her closed white porce- 
lain stove, a beautiful erection rising right up to the 
ceiling and ornamented with delightful little fat porcelain 
Cupids, converted by the zealous official who has charge 
of that department into an open fireplace, so that she 
might enjoy the cheery blaze of the logs. As her room 
was, however, also heated by hot-water pipes, the white 
stove was rarely needed, but on certain occasions when 
visitors, especially English visitors, came to spend the 
evening she would light the fire for their delectation 
and her own, for she confessed to a fondness for our 
English fireplaces ; but, unfortunately, she always had to 
sit up until the fire had gone completely out, as she 
refused to go to bed with the little trap-door leading into 
the chimney left open all night, for, she declared, she 



GERMAN WOMANHOOD 115 

would frieren — be frozen — in the morning. Ventilation 
via the chimney does not commend itself to German 
ideas, though many Germans who have lived for some 
time in England, and visited at houses with modern well- 
grates, have adopted them largely, and one celebrated 
Berlin architect has his beautiful house in the Grunewald 
fitted throughout with English grates ; " but," he adds 
smilingly, " I have German Central- Heizung as well. 
English fires for aesthetic effect, for poetry, for glamour 
and romance, but German hot-water pipes for solid 
comfort." German drawing-rooms are as a rule, even 
in the houses of cultivated people, rather dismal apart- 
ments, owing to the national fondness for chocolate 
colour with which the floors and walls are often painted. 
There is a great look of time-defying solidity too about 
the furniture which is often in imitation walnut, and it is 
not to be wondered at that the Germans themselves 
are rather repelled by the atmosphere they have them- 
selves created in this room, calling it by the name of die 
Kalte Pracht — the cold splendour. In Potsdam the 
" best parlour " look and tastelessness of the drawing- 
rooms of the wives of the Emperor's adjutants were 
simply appalling. I have a vivid recollection of one of 
these rooms, belonging to a very delightful but hopelessly 
unsesthetic woman who was a great favourite at Court, 
where her volubility and good humour helped to dissi- 
pate some of the heavy atmosphere which hangs in- 
evitably over palaces. When I called on her in her flat 
in Potsdam she received me in a drawing-room which was 



n6 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

a positive nightmare of crude colouring and tasteless 
furnishing. An uneasy hard sofa, two equally repellent 
so-called easy-chairs, and six uncompromising straight- 
backed ordinary chairs had been recently re-covered in 
an expensive plush brocade of aggressive mustard yellow 
and green, and the smiling hostess challenged my admira- 
tion of these frightful objects with the easy confidence 
of one who is sure of her own taste. It was the first 
genuine German drawing-room into which I had pene- 
trated, but later on I discovered that it was by no means 
the worst of its species. There were others of unrelieved 
drab dullness, stuffy in the extreme and exhibiting 
depressing pictures of deceased great-aunts and uncles 
in plush frames. Green plush tablecloths, with a small 
hand-worked square of lace in the middle, on which was 
placed a lamp in winter (lamps are still largely used 
in private houses in Germany) and a vase of flowers 
in summer, were largely in evidence. Sometimes, if the 
mistress of the house was young and frivolous, the heavy 
plush curtains hanging at each side of the well-starched 
and closely drawn white net ones would be stuck about 
with faded cotillon favours. There would be a book- 
case for books, and possibly a side table where other 
books were arranged methodically in twos all along the 
edge, looking so orderly that no one dared take up a 
volume for fear of spoiling the beautiful symmetry of the 
arrangement. None of the elegant litter seen in English 
drawing-rooms was to be found ; all magazines and 
papers were put away, and the " Tagliche Rundschau," 



GERMAN WOMANHOOD 117 

folded on the writing-table, looked as though it defied 
anyone to disturb its neatly-lying sheets. 

The outlook of the ordinary German woman of the 
middle-class — she who keeps perhaps one, or at most 
two, servants — seems to be much more circumscribed 
than that of the corresponding class in England. Her 
interests after marriage are expected to be bounded by 
her husband and family. She scarcely keeps in touch 
with the outside world, and if she indulges in sport or 
any form of pleasure other than the theatre, which is 
patronized by middle-class and comparatively poor 
people to an extent much greater than it is in England, 
she would be considered rather modern, and when one 
German woman says of another that she is sehr modern 
— they put the accent on the last syllable — then all the 
rest of her sex know what to think of her. There is a 
certain stuffiness in the German home life, it is apt to 
be kleinlich, as they themselves call it, petty and circum- 
scribed, to degenerate into a mere struggle to keep things 
going, to have for its chief aim the stimulus of the 
children to new educational efforts, sometimes with 
tragically disastrous results. At half -past six in summer, 
and seven in winter, in all classes, high and low, the whole 
family partake of breakfast — it may be earlier if the 
school the children attend is at a distance. The custom 
of living in flats, so universal in Germany, is not a very 
good one for children, and those parents who can afford 
it try to bring them up in the country if they can, where 
there is space to move and breathe, but the ordinary 



n8 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

mother of a German town-child is constantly on the 
rack between two dire possibilities that may befall her 
offspring : the one that they may get nerven-krank, a 
nervous breakdown, or, on the other hand, that they may 
fail to be versetzt, and of the two, the nervous illness 
would be perhaps the least to be feared. It would at 
any rate have no stigma attached to it, as would the 
failure to get the remove into a higher class. 

German children at a very early age appear to be 
weighed down with a burden of school-books. Each 
carries a hard, square satchel, rather like a soldier's 
knapsack, on his back, and their conversation appears 
to be made up of questions and answers as to the progress 
of each other's studies. Inside the satchel, lying on 
top of the school-books and blue exercise books, is a 
substantial " Butter- Br odchen " which the careful mother 
provides daily for each child. In the afternoons, when 
they return from school, she must have ready for them, 
probably prepared by her own hands, a substantial 
meal, beginning with soup and continuing through 
various dishes, such as boil^I beef and rice with prunes, 
smoked herring and salad, spinach and eggs to Schoko- 
laden Brei. Then she must take the children out to 
" snap up a little fresh air," as she puts it, and soon 
after five they must return and begin to work at their 
lessons for the next day. No wonder that in the winter- 
time the children grow pale and pasty-looking. Few 
German children have the bright clear complexions that 
we see in England. A sallow muddy skin is the result 



GERMAN WOMANHOOD 119 

of the long hours spent in hot, airless rooms, for every 
German flat is heated, not to say overheated in the 
winter-time, and the double windows are rarely opened 
for fear of wasting the precious caloric. The German 
woman is as yet only imperfectly trained in the beauties 
of fresh air ; she is cruelly susceptible to draughts, as 
anyone knows who has had the misfortune to travel 
with her in railway trains ; she has hardly begun to 
master the secrets of domestic hygiene, she is herself 
extraordinarily subject to nerves, and the only holiday 
she takes is a " Kur " of a few weeks every summer 
in some remote " Bade-Ort." The whole energies of 
the middle-class woman of somewhat restricted means 
are concentrated in the effort to save up enough money 
to take herself, her husband, and family to the seaside 
or to the mountains during the Ferien, — the children's 
summer holiday in July, — when every hotel is packed to 
bursting-point, when prices are at their highest, and 
fitting accommodation almost impossible to come by. 
One meets her at such places by thousands, clad in 
tightly fitting, trailing, and eminently unsuitable gowns, 
walking sedately and perspiringly along the broad, neat, 
sandy paths so well maintained by the Government 
through all parts of the forest. She looks gravely 
conscientious, as though anxious to get her money's 
worth in fresh air for herself and family, and she may 
be enjoying herself, but she never betrays the fact in 
look or gesture. Probably the absence of housekeeping 
worries and the pleasure of eating meals which she 



120 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

herself has had no share in preparing are the greatest 
assets of her holiday. Her walks — she hates walks as 
a rule — are chiefly initiated by a desire to get rid of 
that superfluous flesh which so implacably pursues the 
German woman after her fortieth year, and her enjoy- 
ment of the air and scenery is languid and perfunctory. 
She will stop at the Aus-sichts-punkt — the view — care- 
fully indicated by a signboard lest the traveller should 
not notice it, and let off the usual exclamations " Herr- 
lich ! W under schon ! Pracht-voll ! " but she is liable to 
have her inner consciousness absorbed by the narrow- 
ness of her own domestic life. The snatches of con- 
versation that one overhears in the beautiful pine forests 
sound singularly inappropriate to the environment of 
the speakers. One wonders why they should choose 
lovely glades of shimmering light and shade for the 
purpose of bemoaning the high price of meat, the de- 
linquencies of " Anna," and the fearful rapidity with 
which Hans wears out his shoes. 

The wealthy German woman is not often to be seen 
taking holiday in her native pine-forests. She prefers 
to go farther afield, and before the War was to be found 
in countless numbers at such places as Bournemouth, 
the Isle of Wight, Cromer, and other watering-places 
on the east and south coast, where with her family she 
improved her knowledge of England and its language, 
and took her first lessons in golf. She also travelled 
a good deal in Italy, and was able to converse fluently 
on the Cinquecento period without realty under- 



GERMAN WOMANHOOD 121 

standing much about it. She took to English sports, 
tobogganed and ski-ed in Switzerland, fished in Norway, 
yachted at Cowes and Kiel, and became agreeably 
cosmopolitan. She was not specially typical of her 
country, but rather of a class to be found everywhere. 

The average German girl as she grows towards 
womanhood, especially if she has wealthy parents and 
can therefore be pretty certain of realizing her ambitions, 
has one desire — to marry, and to marry if possible an 
officer. In Germany there is no limit to the length 
to which wealthy people of obscure birth will go in their 
efforts to gain a footing in the class from which they 
are separated by an insurmountable barrier. Few people 
in England realize the difficulty that wealthy people 
in Germany have when not provided with the magic 
" von " which enables them to be considered " Hof- 
fahig " — Court-capable — in gaining an entry into the 
poor but impecunious circle of the blue-blooded aristo- 
cracy surrounding the throne. It matters not how rich, 
how truly cultivated, how well equipped in all the 
essentials that make real " gentle-people " they may 
be, without the magic monosyllable they cannot hope to 
penetrate to the inner arcanum of the socially ambitious, 
can never be one of the crowd of ladies who have 
achieved the infinite boredom of dragging a heavy court 
train past their sovereign at one of the Cours of the 
Berlin winter season. 

One young naval officer on temporary duty on the 
" Hohenzollern " did not cease to petition the Emperor 



122 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

at every opportunity to grant him the privilege of 
ennoblement, and when pressed for his reason, he said 
that he wished to marry a wealthy and beautiful girl, who 
was determined to rise a step in rank when she married. 
She was a very nice, well-educated girl, and her name was 
Fraulein Schmidt. She didn't mind much about looks 
or money, and she liked the officer very much, but was 
determined not to marry him without a title. The 
Emperor, touched by the woebegone complaints of the 
lover, who was an excellent officer, granted his desire, 
and the marriage was celebrated immediately after the 
patent of nobility had arrived ; and everybody thought 
the bride and bridegroom to have been eminently 
sensible and reasonable in their ambitions. 

The German woman who appeared to me the most 
broad-minded and cultivated of her sex — cultivated I 
mean in the wider sense, not merely having acquired 
a knowledge of several languages and certain historical 
and literary facts, but who possessed a wide and tolerant 
mental outlook — was the educated Jewish woman. 
She was invariably alert and up-to-date. She had 
artistic sense, her house was furnished in an original 
and tasteful manner, she dressed herself beautifully, 
was liberal in her charities, lavish in her hospitality, and 
had distinct social gifts. The Jewish woman is only 
just beginning to fight her way into German society, but 
she does it very efficiently and is well equipped for the 
struggle. 

From early childhood the fact is consistently im- 



GERMAN WOMANHOOD 123 

pressed upon the German woman by parents and 
brothers, aunts and uncles, and, when she grows older, 
by her husband and sons, that she is, being feminine, 
inferior in physical and mental capacity to her mascu- 
line relatives. There is nothing gallant and chivalrous 
in the character of the German husband. He will be 
kind to his wife, will love her faithfully, will see that she 
is as well dressed as his means afford, but he will not 
carry her parcels — she would be very astonished if he 
proposed to do it ; he will never open doors for her or 
surround her with the sweet observances dear to a 
woman's heart. Even during the period of courtship, 
at a time when the fluttering Braut reaches the highest 
pinnacle of happiness, the proud Brautigam is not 
conspicuously considerate of his Schatz — his treasure — 
as he loves to call her. He will still puff the strongest 
cigar-smoke into her face even while he holds her hand 
in a lover-like clasp. He will buy her beautiful gifts of 
flowers, — they are very cheap in Germany, — but he will 
never deny himself in the smallest way to give her 
pleasure. He will be full of easy generosity. If she 
expresses a desire for a thing he will buy it if he has the 
money in his pocket, but he will resent the slightest 
interference with his personal comfort, and he encourages 
an apologetic and worshipping frame of mind in the 
girl he has chosen to be his wife. All German education 
— up to the present time almost entirely under the 
direction and control of men — encourages in women a 
submissive, purely domestic spirit. Copious extracts 



124 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

from '■ Hermann und Dorothea" and similar literature, 
setting forth, from the man's point of view, what is 
expected of woman in her capacity as wife — how she 
must be submissive, first to her parents then to her 
husband, and always ask their advice and never judge 
for herself on any matter — are to be found in all the read- 
ing books of German Hohere-Tochter-Schule, and in no 
schools, whether private or Government, is the girl 
allowed any responsibility whatever, all that is asked 
of her is that she shall obey and learn. And as a rule, 
having nothing to distract her mind, wearing a school 
uniform calculated to chasten the soul and inspire each 
girl with an idea of the paucity of her own charms, 
with her hair plaited tightly and uncompromisingly and 
twisted round her head in hard inartistic coils, exer- 
cising her muscles in the conscientious German manner 
chiefly in the indoor gymnasium, a stranger to the joys 
of hockey and other fresh-air games, she concentrates 
her mind on the only distraction she has — the acquisition 
of knowledge. She throws herself violently into the 
study of languages, literature and geography, mathe- 
matics and "religion" — of science she learns nothing 
with the exception of a little elementary chemistry and 
natural history, but even these are administered in 
small doses, and the greater scientific truths are care- 
fully withheld from her. So that when she emerges from 
school, when she has passed the Rubicon of " Confirma- 
tion," which to a German girl is the great barrier between 
her childhood and her emancipation from irksome 



GERMAN WOMANHOOD 125 

school discipline, she emerges into a radiant world, 
where to her everything is good. She is able to garnish 
her conversation with appropriate quotations from 
Schiller, Goethe, and Shakespeare ; she possesses a 
certain limited culture which suffices for her needs, and 
she has learned industry, cheerfulness, and self-sacrifice, 
and to content herself with very small pleasures. The 
capacity she possesses for extracting the last drop of 
enjoyment from the tiniest entertainment is unequalled 
by the girl of any other nation. If she marries she 
sinks into a rather humdrum round of domestic duties. 
Even if she gains the coveted prize of an officer, her 
life is apt to be extremely dull, and she must manage 
her house with only one servant and the occasional help 
at table of her husband's Bursche or soldier-servant, 
who in all probability is a youth of bucolic stupidity 
and crass ignorance. She abandons on her marriage- 
day any further attempt to cultivate her mind, being 
certain that the stock of knowledge she has accumulated 
while at school will supply all the needs of her soul, 
which, for the rest of her existence, will be fed chiefly 
by emotions, by the love of her husband and children, 
and by her patriotism, for no woman in the world is so 
blindly patriotic as the present-day middle-class German 
woman. Through it she gains an outlet for her many 
suppressed aspirations, she breathes into it that spirit 
of romanticism, of fierce self-sacrifice which her husband, 
growing stout and dull and uninteresting, has never 
been able to inspire. It stirs within her breast vague 



126 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

yearnings and longings after unutterable things. She 
is stimulated and entranced by something outside and 
above herself, and when she sings, " Heil dir im Siege- 
Kranz," she breathes it like a prayer, like an out- 
pouring of her inmost soul. All the sheer stodginess 
and narrowness of her own existence fade away into 
nothingness and are replaced by an exaltation of spirit, 
a burning enthusiasm, which, though to an outsider it 
may contain many elements of the ridiculous, yet none 
the less embodies the national passion and the national 
ideal. 



CHAPTER VIII 
THE PRUSSIAN COURT 

THE tedium of Court ceremonies is only too 
well known to those who are fated to take 
part in them, and the inner life of Courts, 
hedged round as it is with certain artificial conditions, 
conventions, and restrictions which do not prevail in 
ordinary human intercourse, is apt to partake of the 
humdrum and the monotonous to a degree which 
becomes intolerable to a person of alert and independent 
mind. The Prussian Court, in spite of its innumerable 
activities, was no exception to this rule, and the smaller 
German Courts, as far as one could judge, were the 
most soul-stifling places imaginable. Yet the domestic 
life of the Prussian Court, so long as any of the seven 
children of the Emperor were still at home, especially, 
indeed, so long as the youngest one, the only daughter, 
now Duchess of Brunswick, remained unmarried, was 
the centre of a very affectionate family life, which 
grouped itself around the person of the Empress. In 
the intimacies of home there was nothing that was 
different from that of any other high-class German house- 
hold. The children were brought up in a very happy 

127 



128 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

atmosphere, and the sons, when at the age of ten they 
were sent away, first to school and college, and finally 
installed at the age of eighteen in houses of their own, 
always paid frequent visits to the old home. Prince 
Adalbert at Kiel always mourned that he was not so 
favourably situated in this respect as his brothers at 
Potsdam. 

But outside of what one might call this domestic 
nucleus, there stretched an area of vapidity and empti- 
ness, a mental atmosphere, as some one once called it, 
" of shut-up rooms into which the light and air from 
outside may only penetrate in very small doses." It 
was remarkable that at the Court of one of the most 
alert and active, kings who has ever sat upon the throne 
of Prussia — I refer, of course, to William II, German 
Emperor — this sense of dullness and stupidity should 
be the prevailing impression. The various ladies and 
gentlemen who made up the Hof-Staat, or Court circle, 
were not individually less intelligent and gifted than 
the rest of the world, and some of them had indeed gifts 
of a special order ; yet collectively and in the exercise of 
their functions at Court, they appeared to me as though 
belonging to a world of thought in which people outside 
of it had little share. A good deal of this effect may, I 
think, be traced to the fact that the ladies and gentlemen- 
in- waiting at the Prussian Court, as well as the other 
officials, such as the Master of the Horse, the Mistress 
of the Robes, do not change with a change of Ministry, 
but remain permanently attached, and are, as far as I 




PRINCE ADALBERT OF PRUSSIA, THIRD SON OF THE 
GERMAN EMPEROR 



THE PRUSSIAN COURT 129 

could judge, expected to keep themselves entirely aloof 
from interest in, or discussion of, politics. 

It may have been a reaction from the course pur- 
sued by the Empress Frederick, who, it is well known, 
took a very active interest in all political questions ; but 
the present Empress, whose natural bent is in other 
directions, very much dislikes any of her ladies to have 
any precise views on national questions. Their role, 
in her opinion, should be one of graceful acquiescence 
and approval, or if they venture an opinion it should 
be one not opposed to the Emperor's own. She never 
liked to have the domestic current of existence disturbed 
by the acerbities of politics. Disputes and arguments 
were painfully frequent necessities of existence, but why 
introduce them unnecessarily ? 

And the ladies, cultivated and kind-hearted, as I knew 
them, and of a fine, self-sacrificing spirit, acquiesced in 
their mistress's desire and wisely kept their opinions to 
themselves, for at Court countless other things occupy 
the mind ; there are tedious, tiresome letters to write, 
ceremonies to attend, elaborate clothes to be put on or 
put off, and a general conciliatory attitude must be 
adopted to every one, high or low, that one meets. The 
three principal ladies, who were given the title of Ex- 
cellenz after long service, had been in the service of 
the Empress from the time of her marriage, when she 
was only Princess William, and their permanent home 
was the Court, which they had never quitted in all those 
years, excepting for the yearly summer holiday, when 



130 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

for three weeks they were released from their duties and 
went to take a rest cure among the mountains. The 
lady who held the post of Ober-Hof-Meisterin, equivalent 
to our Mistress of the Robes, one of the three ladies 
above mentioned, was a woman of remarkable inde- 
pendence of thought and character, humorous, broad- 
minded, full of insight and intuition, and gifted with 
great common sense and a blunt manner of speaking the 
truth, which was almost uncanny at Court, where a 
system of wrapping up things and hiding facts seems to 
be an almost inevitable condition of existence. Her 
downright manner did not invariably make her beloved, 
but she remains in my mind one of the finest natures 
that I encountered in Germany. Unfortunately her 
influence was not felt as much as one might have expected 
in the Court itself, which remained impenetrable to the 
progressive thought, the new aspects that the world 
has assumed during the last hundred years. Such 
names, for example, as those of Darwin and Herbert 
Spencer were looked upon with mistrust and dislike. 
They were the names of men who wished to upset the 
old order of things, who disturbed men's comfortable 
beliefs and settled convictions. Nobody at Court would 
think of reading their books, but actively disliked their 
doctrines, whatever they were, without knowing much 
about them. The wonderful world of science and dis- 
covery, as applied to the amelioration of the conditions 
of human existence, remained, as far as the Court was 
concerned, a closed book. Louis Pasteur's name, for 



THE PRUSSIAN COURT 131 

example, was hardly known there, and only those new 
inventions were regarded with interest which might be 
applied to military purposes, as, for example, the motor- 
car, — for it was during my residence at the Prussian 
Court that the first automobile penetrated into the sacred 
area where formerly Frederick the Great had seen his 
soldiers drilling. Automobiles were regarded by the 
ladies of the Court as innovations of the most detestable 
character, quite unworthy of the dignity of palaces, and 
any accident happening to them, a punctured tyre or 
a breakdown of any kind, was looked upon as a direct 
interposition of Providence to frustrate the unholy 
desires of man for improving on nature. It was useless 
to urge that railway trains came almost within the same 
category as automobiles, only we had been used to them 
all our lives. And I still remember, with a distinct feeling 
of annoyance, that, in connexion with railways, the name 
of George Stephenson seemed to convey nothing to any- 
one in the Palace. 

" What ! " I remember saying to the Princess. " You 
never heard of the man who invented railway trains ? " 

She vaguely murmured some German name which I 
did not recognize. She was quite sure, whoever he was, 
he must be a German. 

Automobiles in England were getting quite common- 
place objects of the road at the time when the first one 
rolled in between the great iron gates past the sentries 
on to the Sand-Hof before the facade of the Palace, 
which in its French rococo style is slightly reminiscent 



132 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

of Versailles. The Emperor was very enthusiastic over 
his new purchase and could talk of nothing else at table. 
A great deal was said about the frequent accidents 
with horses, and William, I remember, was very insistent 
on the necessity of having special roads for automobiles, 
so that they could be kept apart from the other traffic. 

" But the cost of the roads would be enormous, your 
Majesty," some one remarked ; and the Emperor looked 
distinctly annoyed. It was one of his characteristics 
never to reckon the cost of a scheme — he had a truly 
Imperial disregard for matters of finance. 

At the Imperial table, unless the Emperor was, as 
usually happened, in a talkative mood, and himself 
sustained the chief burden of the conversation, it was 
apt to flag and dwindle immediately into mere common- 
places. People made timid, rather futile observations, 
occasional silences would fall deadly cold upon the table, 
even the most brilliant talkers appeared somewhat 
constrained, and afraid of making any original remark 
lest it might not meet with Imperial approval. This 
always struck me as strange, for a very small joke 
seemed to go a long way in Imperial circles, and was 
welcomed with eager and exaggerated hilarity and re- 
peated to the remotest possibility of repetition. 

The dinner-table conversation was apt to get into a 
groove of smooth politeness, as nobody ever disputed or 
even by the most roundabout innuendo contradicted 
any statement His Majesty chose to make. 

Once I remember thrilling the circle seated round the 



THE PRUSSIAN COURT 133 

table at Rominten, the Emperor's East Prussian hunting- 
lodge, by venturing to correct His Majesty's translation 
of a word. 

He was telling in his usual picturesque and emphatic 
manner a story of the time when his sons were little 
boys and first began to study under a German tutor. 
In their infancy they had always been accustomed to 
hearing and speaking more English than German, so 
knew comparatively little of the latter language, much 
to the indignation of many good German patriots. 
The tutor asked one of the boys — it was Prince Adalbert, 
who afterwards entered the German Navy — if he could 
tell him what was the emblem of Germany, and received 
the English word "eagle" in reply. The tutor, who 
knew no English, shrank back in horror, hardly believing 
his ears ; for the German word Igel — hedgehog — is pro- 
nounced in exactly the same way, and the thought that 
a son of the Kaiser could possibly believe that this 
ignoble animal represented the German Empire was 
naturally very painful and repellent to the good Pro- 
fessor. 

The Emperor told the anecdote, speaking in German, 
and gave the English translation of the word Igel as 
" porcupine," a mistake arising easily from the associa- 
tion of ideas. He repeated the mistake several times, but 
though the adjutants and the ladies sitting in his imme- 
diate vicinity all obviously recognized the error — one 
of them indeed asked me in a whisper, " But isn't 
' porcupine ' Stachel-Schwein in German ? " — none of 



134 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

them, to my surprise, made any remark, but seemed 
tacitly agreed to let the mistake pass unnoticed. 

But I, rushing in perhaps where aides-de-camp and 
Court ladies feared to tread, and moved by the pedagogic 
instinct which prompts the correction of other people's 
lapses, called out when I next heard the offending word : 

"Hedgehog, not porcupine, your Majesty." 

I do not know if I contravened any rule of Court 
etiquette in thus boldly correcting the German Emperor 
at his own table, but I noticed a sort of relieved look on 
the faces of the suite. They evidently had been torn 
between a desire for accuracy and a reluctance to be the 
means of bringing it about. 

As for the Emperor, he stared at me with frowning 
eyes for a moment, not angry eyes, but merely con- 
centrated in thought, and then immediately recognizing 
the mistake he had made, corroborated my remark. 

" What ? Hedgehog ? Why, yes, of course it is. 
Hedgehog, not porcupine. Both rather prickly, though 
—eh ? " 

And he went off into a loud roar of laughter at his 
own joke. 

That was an irritating feature, that nobody dared to 
disagree openly or to traverse anything the Emperor 
said, and although he had no objection to being put right 
on small matters of detail as in the above instance, yet 
he grew rather irritable with people who differed in 
opinion, hence I suppose the reluctance to enter into 
discussion which was so pronounced a feature of Court 



THE PRUSSIAN COURT 135 

life. Indeed, one noticed how if for a few moments any- 
one ventured to oppose any of the Emperor's views, they 
often allowed him to evade the point in dispute and 
triumphantly bring forward some side issue with which 
they felt bound to agree. When this was conceded, 
His Majesty, with a triumphant nod of the head, would 
walk off, evidently delighted with his own perspicacity 
and the convincingness of his arguments. I have known 
people in humbler spheres pursue very similar tactics. 

Picnics at Court were of almost daily occurrence. 
They were not conspicuous for gaiety, and usually 
involved a tremendous amount of preliminary waiting. 

" How splendid ! " remarked a Kammer-herr once. 
" Your English name for Hof Damen unci Herrn — ladies 
and gentlemen-in-waiting. How truly descriptive ! Yes, 
we are always waiting, waiting." 

And the waiting for the arrival of the Kaiser at 
picnics often stretched into an hour or more. Excursions 
on the water or in carriages were usually made to some 
one of the many little Royal castles, scattered so liberally 
in the neighbourhood of Potsdam by dead and gone 
members of the Hohenzollern family, who appear in 
an extraordinary degree to have exercised a love of 
building queer, picturesque, rather small and incon- 
venient dwellings for themselves, in any spot which 
happened to strike their fancy. 

In Potsdam, where the river Havel winds bewilder- 
ingly up and down among the land, forming a maze of 
beautiful lakes, whose creeks run up almost into the 



136 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

principal streets of the town, these trips were usually 
made by water, in the little steamer "Alexandria." 

The first sign at the New Palace that a picnic was 
afoot would be a procession of carriages moving slowly 
over the Mopke — the wide space in front of the Palace 
lying between it and the stables — going towards the 
various entrances to pick up the different individuals 
who were to form the party. Other Royal carriages 
might be sent to Potsdam to fetch one or two invited 
guests, and the big kitchen wagons, containing cold 
viands and table implements, could also be seen moving 
off by road to the appointed rendezvous in the woods. 
None of the usual hilarity and fun attendant on ordinary 
everyday picnics, such as for example the little Princess 
sometimes enjoyed with her companions, was ever to be 
discovered in these Court excursions. They were tedious 
affairs, where most people looked bored and unhappy and 
apprehensive of catching cold. They partook too much 
of the nature of functions, and the wearisome waiting for 
the Emperor's arrival put everybody out of tune. When 
the Princess was allowed to join the party, there was 
an inevitable but invariably futile attempt made by 
the conscientious Ober-Gouvemante, always seconded 
and chiefly stimulated and inspired by the ladies-in- 
waiting, to keep the little Princess at home. They very 
much disapproved of the excitement — though there 
was nothing wildly exciting about the business — and the 
association with grown-up people, and they had old- 
fashioned ideas about keeping the Princess childish and 



THE PRUSSIAN COURT 137 

unsophisticated. They were very keen that she should 
lead a simple life, and their theories, I have not the 
slightest doubt, were excellent ; but what they always 
failed to take into account was the fact that the parents 
of the Princess, the Emperor and Empress, had other 
views on the subject, and that the character of the 
Princess herself, an eager, active, impulsive personality, 
was already developed far beyond the simple, bread- 
and-butter limit which they had decided was the 
proper boundary of her existence until she emerged 
from the schoolroom a fully-fledged Princess. The 
lady into whose hands was given the task of supervising 
the education of the Royal children always continued 
valiantly to fight in defence of her theories, and 
always retired from the combat conspicuously worsted ; 
for her remonstrances were invariably unavailing, 
though she always consoled herself with the remark, 
" Ich habe meine Pflicht getan " — " I have done my 
duty." 

So that picnics, like all other pleasures which infringed 
the regular rules laid down for the existence of the 
Princess, who was supposed to be in bed every night by 
nine o'clock, were marked, between the announcement 
of their imminence and the actual moment when the 
Royal carriages drove up to the door, by extraordinarily 
acrimonious skirmishes between two opposing elements, 
in which the Empress and the Princess on the one side 
were ranged against the solid phalanx — they believed 
themselves loyally bound, whatever their private 



138 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

opinions might be, to stand or fall together — of the 
ladies of the Court, who, standing shoulder to shoulder 
and like party politicians all uttering the same argu- 
ments and catch phrases, were, as I have said, with- 
out exception ignominiously crushed under the hand 
of superior authority. With a dauntless persistence, 
which might be considered, if tactless, yet worthy of 
admiration, they always, time after time, repeated the 
same interminable tactics, so that all picnics, on what 
may be called the feminine side of the Court, started 
under somewhat gloomy auspices, as the combatants, 
victors and vanquished, laboured for some time under a 
sense of injury or defeat, and an atmosphere charged 
with a sulky sense of outrage was the one in which the 
" party of pleasure " set out towards its appointed 
destination. 

Usually all the ladies and gentlemen and the invited 
guests drove first of all to the landing-stage, where was 
a spacious wooden hall, built by the Emperor, in Nor- 
wegian style. Here everybody assembled, standing 
about and talking ; old generals in uniform, their swords 
clanking, wandered about from group to group shaking 
hands ponderously and meditatively in the German 
way, which insists that everybody at a party shall greet 
everybody else there present. Then a long wait ensued, 
until presently, perhaps, the carriage of the Princess 
appeared, and everybody would rush to the entrance. 
There would be more bows, hand-shakings, greetings. 
The young Princess, laughing and talking gaily, brought 



THE PRUSSIAN COURT 139 

life and an atmosphere of cheerful youth into the dull 
assembly. No wonder that her parents liked to have 
her there ! There was further waiting. Some of the 
ladies would subside on to the hard wooden Norwegian 
chairs with which the hall is furnished, or examine the 
carved bowls on the shelf running round the room, or 
try to hide a yawn behind a white glace glove. Then 
a footman dashes in. 

" Majestdten kommen," he announces. The ladies 
in the chairs jump up hurriedly, the officials on duty 
crowd round the entrance, while the rest of the party 
line up behind them on each side. The Princess stands 
in the doorway on the top step. There is a trampling 
of horses' hoofs on the gravel, and a universal bow bends 
the assembly just, I used to think, as corn is bowed 
when a stray breeze passes over a field of wheat. The 
Empress would step forward, bowing graciously, with 
that rather weary but pleasant and never-failing smile 
of hers. A Royalty, especially a female Royalty, who 
cannot smile readily in public is always, in Court circles, 
regarded, whatever other qualities she may possess, as 
a complete failure. So the Empress, however tired she 
may feel, fights valiantly against her own fatigue, 
shakes hands, makes kindly, chatty remarks to every 
one within her reach, while her husband in his brilliant 
uniform stalks round among the officers, sometimes 
standing in front of one with folded arms, indulging in 
a prolonged and searching look, then he says some- 
thing, obviously something funny, for every one near 



140 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

enough to hear bursts into the ready laughter that 
attends all Royal jokes, and finally His Majesty 
shakes hands with the culprit and passes on to some 
one else. 

Close to the landing-stage on which the waiting- 
room is built lies the little river steamer, painted in 
white and gold, with her smart crew of blue-clad sailors, 
men belonging to the Emperor's sea-going yacht " Hohen- 
zollern." On the shining water which stretches away as 
far as one can see, white swans, the Havel swans, which 
are under the protection of the Crown, glide in and out 
of the dense masses of reeds bordering the water-side ; 
and at a little distance, permanently moored about 
four hundred yards from the shore, lies an English ship, 
— I wonder if she is still there, — the " Royal Louise," pre- 
sented to King Frederick William III of Prussia by 
William IV of England as an interesting souvenir of 
the British Navy of those days. How often we used to 
pass her, her hull painted black and white, all her masts 
and rigging silhouetted clearly against the sunset. 
Sails she had none, for the only voyage she ever made 
was the one from England all those many years ago. 
She just rode there, year in, year out, growing more old 
and out of date, and the fresh coat of paint she received 
from time to time appeared only to intensify the fact 
that she was a very ancient, out-of-date piece of 
goods. 

" There she is, your English ship," the Emperor 
would say to me, when we were all on board ; " look at 



THE PRUSSIAN COURT 141 

her port-holes and the size of her guns. Looks like a 
toy, doesn't she ? " 

Sometimes the German naval officers— there were 
always one or two among the suite of the Emperor — 
would come and talk to me about our British ships, and 
I always took a malicious pleasure in pointing out that 
the German Navy, whatever the future might have in 
store, could never enjoy a picturesque sea-fight like 
Trafalgar. 

" No artist will ever worry to put the sea-fights of 
the future on to canvas," I would say ; and we then 
went on to talk about the beauty of full-rigged sailing- 
ships and the absence of artistic possibilities in the 
modern ironclad, but never in that light chatter did 
I really grasp the possibility of hostilities between 
England and Germany. It seemed so utterly un- 
thinkable that anything could disturb that pleasant, 
friendly intercourse. The naval officers of the German 
Empire were to me always the finest of her sons, 
immeasurably superior to those of the army. They 
possessed a direct, frank simplicity, and spoke with 
enthusiasm of their friendship with British officers 
whom they had met in ports abroad. 

As the little " Alexandria " steamed across the 
broad-bosomed Havel, crowds of small boats converged 
upon her from all directions ; and the big steamers which 
ply up and down between Berlin and Potsdam, packed 
tightly with perspiring crowds of people, would, as they 
passed, break out into frantic cheers and a flutter 



142 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

of waving pocket-handkerchiefs. The Emperor and 
Empress sat on camp stools on the upper deck, together 
with a few of the guests, while the rest of us stayed 
below, watching the changing light on the waters and 
enjoying the cool breeze that came across the river. 
The ladies would perhaps for a while continue to give 
expression to their dissatisfaction at the presence of 
the young Princess on board, and re-enumerate all the 
reasons why it would have been so much better if she 
had been left at home — reasons with which everybody 
was in perfect agreement, though nobody in view of the 
repeated failures of the ladies' own efforts was able to 
contribute any helpful suggestion to a discussion which 
was as futile as it was wearisome, yet which was invari- 
ably repeated during all the years of my residence at 
the Prussian Court. 

Sometimes we landed at Pfauen-Insel, the tiny Isle 
of Peacocks, though no peacocks are now to be seen 
there, and ate our supper, a simple meal, consisting of 
soup and one or two cold dishes, usually Kalte Schnitzel, 
or " cold slices," of ham, tongue, veal, sausage, and 
other cold meats, all put on the same dish and handed 
round to the guests to choose for themselves which they 
will take. The supper was eaten out of doors in an 
angle of the tiny absurd little Schloss, built in imita- 
tion of a ruin by the husband of Queen Louise, Frederick 
William III of Prussia. He and his wife with their 
children, the second of whom afterwards became the 
V Old " Emperor William I, spent a good deal of time 



THE PRUSSIAN COURT 143 

here ; and Louise's bonnets and a queer high-waisted, 
much-braided, military-looking riding-habit of hers still 
hangs in the cupboard, while her spinet, with all its 
strings broken, and giving forth no sound when its 
queer narrow black keys are struck, yet has its place in 
the sunny angle of the window where she used to sit 
and play it to her children. 

These picnics always appeared to me infinitely pre- 
ferable to the stiff meals which we took indoors, where 
every one had to appear in elegant evening toilet ; but 
it was surprising how little the Court ladies and gentlemen 
appeared to enjoy them. 

I had a conversation with one of the Emperor's 
aides-de-camp as to his experiences of the frequent 
journeys of His Majesty abroad, of the cruises to Norway 
or in the Mediterranean. The Count shuddered visibly 
as he spoke of them, and a look of acute misery spread 
over his features. 

" No one can have any idea what discomforts we 
have to suffer. The Emperor asks a great many more 
people on board than can possibly be properly accom- 
modated. He never understands that a ship is not 
elastic. He seems to think it means just laying extra 
covers and ordering in more stores; he never thinks 
what it is for me, a man of my years and bulk," — he was 
of a figure which in Germany is called wohl-beleibt — well- 
bodied, — " to be squeezed into a tiny cabin where I can 
with difficulty turn round, and to have to sleep on a 
hard bunk — for they are hard, very hard — instead of a 



144 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

spring mattress. Then I am always sea-sick — always. 
His Majesty too suffers when it is very rough, but I get 
upset easily. I am in misery all the time I am at sea, 
and " — here he whispered mysteriously — " the ' Hohen- 
zollern ' is a bad sea-boat, she rolls frightfully when the 
least sea is on. I'm all right on a big steamer, but I 
can't stand these sea trips with His Majesty." 

The younger men did not mind so much, but were 
none of them enthusiastic. 

" It is so different," they would say, " when one 
travels for one's own pleasure, from what it is when 
one travels as part of one's Dienst. We feel rather like 
footmen, always hanging about ready to be ordered to 
do something. We are always glad to get back again 
to our proper work." 

And indeed an atmosphere of oppressive boredom — 
perhaps, it may be, inevitable at all Courts — prevailed to 
an acute degree. The hours of service were very long, 
especially for the adjutants who were on duty, as they 
had to be up at six so as to get through all the corre- 
spondence and have it duly arranged by nine o'clock. 
If, as frequently happened in the summer-time, they 
rode with the Emperor before breakfast, they had to 
rise still earlier. 

Their breakfast was a very hurried one, to correspond 
with that of His Majesty, who rarely spent more than 
a quarter of an hour over his first meal, and then they 
must be ready to accompany William and the Empress, 
their children, and several yellow dachshunds on that 



THE PRUSSIAN COURT 145 

after-breakfast walk which only bad weather was allowed 
to interfere with. 

At ten o'clock the audiences of the day began, and 
the adjutants were always required to be within call, 
so they hung wearily about, unoccupied, but not free 
to occupy themselves until luncheon, the German 
Mittag-Essen, the principal meal of the day. Both 
before and after this meal there was much desultory 
talk and waiting ; indeed, I think the most striking part 
of a courtier's existence is the amount of time wasted — 
the stultifying, soul-destroying want of intelligent in- 
terest in life, together with the impossibility of finding 
time for really essential things. There was much 
covert grumbling at this unnecessary waste of other 
people's activities, for before the epoch of William II 
Court life had been simpler and made fewer demands on 
the energies and strength of the suite ; but the present 
German Emperor is never seen either in public or 
private life alone. He is a man who appears to dislike 
solitude and self-communion. If he walks in the garden, 
it is never by himself. 

At the time of what has been called the " November 
Storm," which arose in Germany after the publication in 
the "Daily Telegraph" of October 28, 1908, of the famous 
interview between the Emperor and some unknown 
person who hoped thereby " to remove that obstinate 
misconception of the character of the Kaiser's feelings 
towards England, deeply rooted in the ordinary English- 
man's breast," the Emperor was seen walking, as was 
10 



146 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

his wont, up and down the gravelled court-yard around 
which the Palace is built, accompanied by two of his 
Flugel- Adjutants. From my sitting-room in the angle 
of the Palace I saw the three men pacing ceaselessly up 
and down the long arid stretch of gravel, in full view of 
all the windows; but the remarkable thing was the 
silence that hung over them. The usual animated 
gestures, the constant emphatic noddings of the head 
and shaking of the forefinger that were the accustomed 
accompaniments of the Emperor's conversation, were 
absent. He paced up and down in a gloomy, crushed 
attitude, looking on the ground, and addressing never 
a word to the two men who were with him ; so that the 
three went wearily backwards and forwards time after 
time, in the completest and strangest silence. After a 
while, perhaps half an hour later, I glanced through the 
window again, and saw that the trio was still there ; 
but the two gentlemen — one was a military, the other a 
naval officer — had fallen behind the Emperor, who strode 
on a few paces in front of them, still in that grieved and 
broken attitude, seemingly absorbed in his own thoughts 
and obviously undergoing acute mental suffering. It 
seemed to me strangely characteristic of the man, that 
at a time when a cloud had obscured his popularity with 
his people, when he was smarting under the sense of 
having, with the very best intentions in the world, by 
his candid indiscretions, brought a storm of resentment 
and criticism upon his own head, at the moment when, 
if ever, a man needed to be alone with himself and his 



THE PRUSSIAN COURT 147 

own thoughts, he had not thought fit to dispense with 
the attendance of his gentlemen, and had chosen a very 
conspicuous part of the Palace grounds in which to air 
the undoubted heaviness and depression of mind from 
which he was suffering. 



CHAPTER IX 
THE KAISER 

LOOKING back across the intervening years 
which separate me from the day in 1902 when I 
first saw and spoke to the Kaiser, I try to recall 
my impressions of him before and after that time, the 
man as I pictured him in my mind, and the man I dis- 
covered him to be during the seven years in which I had 
opportunities to see, hear, and study that unique per- 
sonality. 

He had seized my imagination, as he has seized that 
of many others. There was something so human, even 
in his blunders, something that kept him from the remote- 
ness of other monarchs, who moved like well-regulated 
machinery across the vision of the world, keeping their 
proper places in the orbit of their respective spheres ; 
but here was one who turned no merely official face to 
the public, but put his own personality, his individual 
tastes and manner of thought candidly before it, who 
seemed to conceal nothing, to take every one into his 
confidence and be charmingly, indiscreetly frank and 
open. 

The German Emperor had long ago galvanized the 

148 



THE KAISER 149 

world into alert expectation, was alternately admired 
and condemned, had spoken more wisdom and more 
foolishness than the average monarch permits himself. 
In England, our former admiration of him had received 
a rude shock by the publication of the " Kruger " tele- 
gram, a shock only partially neutralized by his appear- 
ance at the dying bed of his grandmother, Queen 
Victoria. 

The manner of this sovereign, it has unanimously 
been conceded by all who have met him, has a great 
magnetic charm — the charm of a robust vitality, of a 
breezy unconventionality which, exhibited by a monarch 
to a mere man, contains much subtle flattery. At one 
leap, so to speak, William jumps down gaily from his 
Imperial throne and ranges himself with the greatestgood- 
humour, frequently with jocularity, beside the person 
who, maybe for the first time, comes with some diffidence 
and shrinking into the awful presence of Royalty. The 
Emperor in most of his pictures prefers to be depicted 
with a stern, martial expression of countenance, the 
expression he assumes when on military duty, and this 
will probably also be the one he will wear for the first 
half-minute of his appearance at any interview, but it 
is speedily succeeded by a variety of even somewhat 
exaggerated humorous facial changes. If he laughs, 
which he is sure to do a good many times, he will laugh 
with absolute abandonment, throwing back his head, 
opening his mouth to the fullest possible extent, shaking 
his whole body, and often stamping with one foot to show 



150 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

his excessive enjoyment of any joke. It is all very 
unexpected and, until one is used to it, almost discon- 
certing. He illustrates in his features to an unusual 
extent all the varied emotions that possess him, and has 
many quaint mannerisms, as, for example, he will 
continually shake the forefinger of his right hand into 
the face of anyone whom he wishes to convince, or will 
rock slowly on his toes backwards and forwards. At 
other times he will " jiggle," as children say, violently 
on one leg. Some days he appears to be more restless 
in this respect than others, and there are times when he 
preserves a staid, calm dignity of manner ; but his usual, 
natural habit is the quick nervous one, the other is more 
or less assumed. 

One has to admit that the Kaiser, though a good- 
looking man, is not quite so handsome as his portraits 
make him out to be. His nose is thick, his blue eyes 
rather hard and cold and shallow, excepting when they 
are creased in laughter, when they shine and sparkle like 
steel. His head is well shaped and there is as yet no 
trace of approaching baldness. His hair, at the time 
I saw him last in 1913, was beginning to be lightly 
frosted on the temples, but elsewhere was brown and 
plentiful ; there were only a few grey threads to be seen 
in his upturned moustache. His lips are thick and red, 
closing over strong yellow well-preserved teeth (he always 
patronizes an American dentist), and his right hand of 
overwhelming strength, which he occasionally tests on 
the members of his suite, who, when the Kaiser happens 




WILLIAM II, ON ST. HUBERTS DAY, AT THE CLOSE OF THE 

CUSTOMARY HUNT, TALKING WITH HIS FOURTH SON, PRINCK 

AUGUSTUS WILLIAM. THE EMPEROR HAS ADDED A MILITARY 

CLOAK TO HIS HUNT UNIFORM 



THE KAISER 151 

to be in a bantering mood, rather shrink from an Imperial 
hand-grip. 

" The mailed fist," he once said to me when I could 
not restrain myself from wincing at his hand-shake. He 
made a wide grimace and his eyes were almost hidden 
by the creases of laughter round them. 

He keeps his left arm, which is practically useless, 
always resting on his hip ; his left hand, the fingers of 
which are ornamented with several heavy rings, also 
with a very ugly brown mole, is also incapable of much 
movement, being able only to retain small light things 
such as a glove or a paper. It also holds the reins when 
riding, but has no control over the horse, which has to be 
specially trained to respond only to knee pressure. 

The Emperor looks a fine figure in uniform, but the 
greatest shock of my life — one which disillusioned me in a 
moment as it were — was the first sight of him in ordinary 
civilian tourist clothes. His Majesty was almost un- 
recognizable. I do not know if it was the cut of the 
clothes, or the colour, or the shape of the hat he was 
wearing, a somewhat buccaneering type of Panama, 
but I was irresistibly reminded of those gentlemen who 
come on the stage in rather " loud " garments at variety 
entertainments, and sing songs of mingled comedy and 
pathos to the applause of the gallery. The clothes looked 
like a bad disguise. Many German gentlemen lose much 
in appearance when out of uniform, but none to the 
extent that their Emperor does, for he no longer has any 
shred of dignity, and, curiously enough, that charm of 



152 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

manner of which I have spoken is also bereft of its 
influence, merging into what seems almost an offensive 
and wearisome buffoonery. William is wise not to 
appear before his subjects excepting in uniform. 

The Emperor has great faith in his own personal 
influence with the people and loses no opportunity of 
showing himself among them. He talks to them with 
ease, and usually has some humorous remark to make, 
which is repeated from mouth to mouth and sends the 
crowd into fits of laughter. He exploits his own 
personality for all it is worth. He is not a man to leave 
unemployed any natural gifts he may possess, and he 
knows that if you can amuse and interest people you 
can generally persuade them to agree with you on serious 
matters. He realizes that people are flattered and 
pleased by small personal gifts, and wherever he goes he 
sprinkles trifles of jewellery, books, or his own photo- 
graphs, with lavish hand. 

Once at table he told us how, on his last visit to 
Norway, when he landed from the " Hohenzollern " 
at a small Norwegian port, he noticed the absence of a 
certain good woman, the wife of the proprietor of a little 
inn built close to the quay, who, year after year, had 
invariably been on hand to present a bouquet of flowers 
to the Emperor when he landed, and on inquiry was 
told that the day before she had added another member 
to her already large family of ten children, and was 
greatly annoyed that she was for the first time prevented 
from carrying out the usual pleasant little ceremony. 



THE KAISER 153 

So the Emperor gave an order to his adjutant to give 
a small present on His Majesty's part to the braver Frau, 
and a basket of flowers, together with packages of various 
Delicatessen, was sent to rejoice and console the heart of 
the invalid. These small kindnesses of His Majesty 
were always faithfully chronicled in the newspapers, and 
doubtless had their share in winning popularity. 

German school reading^books are liberally besprinlded 
with accounts of similar incidents in the lives of the " Old 
Emperor " and the Emperor Frederick, together with 
many of the present reigning Emperor and Empress, 
small and insignificant anecdotes, but none the less 
powerful in bringing the mind of childhood into definite 
and pleasant relation with the ruling powers. 

No one can judge a man, especially a man so many- 
sided, of so many varying moods as the German Emperor, 
at one interview. The character of this monarch has 
so many manifestations of itself, some of them so 
palpably contradicting the others, that it is quite possible 
to come away after an hour's talk with him — an hour of 
that astonishingly frank, fluent torrent of words so 
characteristic of the man — believing that this is the last 
and the only real revelation of the Kaiser's personality, 
that other men's conceptions of him have been false. 

Those who have stood on one side and watched the 
effect of these various interviews with men of all nations 
— grave American professors, English bishops and men of 
mark in the literary or scientific world — can always 
forecast the result. Without exception every one has 



154 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

retired dazzled and charmed, too blinded by the honour 
of unbosomed Royalty, of a cataract of confidential 
self-revelations, to be able clearly to criticize, to weigh 
the intrinsic merit, of what has been said, or to appraise 
its value as a real contribution to the world's thought. 

This is a great characteristic of the Emperor's con- 
versation, its extreme plausibility, and a certain magnetic 
power of convincing men against the dictates of their 
own reason. The effect may be evanescent, but it is 
invariably produced. Later on there may be a reaction, 
and the first favourable impression, under the cold light 
of inner searching, will die away ; but the gay charm 
of manner, the easy friendliness, maybe a slap on the 
shoulder or a familiar clutch on the arm on the Emperor's 
part, will have disarmed a too acute criticism. All men 
enjoy for once in their lives to be slapped on the back 
by an Emperor. It is a rare and precious experience, 
and remains the chief feature of the interview. They 
may not be aware, either, that it is the usual Imperial 
manner, but imagine that they alone have been able 
to arouse this unusual friendly geniality. 

It is a very bitter thing to be disillusioned about 
anybody of whom one has held an exaggeratedly high 
opinion, and with me the process, though I fought 
strenuously against it, began very soon after my intro- 
duction to the Prussian Court. Personally, though I 
found the Emperor to be extraordinarily jolly and 
agreeable, not in the least as stern and grave as I had 
expected, by slow degrees I became convinced that he 



THE KAISER 155 

did not even approximate to the great man I had hitherto 
believed him to be. 

And the chief reason of this view — one that was, I 
found, accepted by his whole Court down to the humblest 
servant — was, I think, that the Emperor possessed so 
much of what to my English upbringing appeared to 
be "side." I cannot find any other word that just 
expresses that assertiveness of his own personality 
which I found absent in other Germans whom I met at 
that time. I became conscious too of the fact that this 
quality of the Emperor was rather obnoxious to his 
Court and secretly deplored by many of them. They 
were, almost without exception, dubious of the effect 
that their ruler's versatility, his brilliance, and his 
peculiar temperament and character might eventually 
have upon the destinies of the German race. Yet every 
individual at Court was conspicuously loyal to their 
Emperor. They put everything that he did in the best 
possible light. They exaggerated his good actions and 
minimized his foolish ones, but they were all, one per- 
ceived, secretly uneasy, anxious, and apprehensive. 

The ladies of the household, grown grey in the service 
of their mistress the Empress, trained from youth in a 
school of blind devotion to the reigning house, never 
permitted themselves to question or to criticize anything 
that their versatile and restless Kaiser might do. Some 
people, especially those outside the Court circle, were 
inclined to ridicule this passive attitude of simple adora- 
tion, but to me there was in it something very touching 



156 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

and sacred, quite apart from the fact that it was un- 
doubtedly the wisest course to pursue, to believe that in 
the widest sense of the word " the King can do no wrong." 

When trouble fell, as it did in the days I have before 
referred to, after the " Daily Telegraph " publication 
in 1908 of the Emperor's conversation with some one 
whose personality still remains unrevealed, every 
one seemed to take a personal share in it and to be 
overwhelmed by sorrow. 

The gloom of the Prussian Court at that time, when 
the Emperor was attacked on every side for his indis- 
cretions, not only by foreigners, but by his own Press 
and people, can hardly be adequately pictured. The 
Emperor made no attempt to conceal the deep dejec- 
tion of his soul, but moved about — this man usually so 
loquacious, so pleased with himself and the world — in 
a mournful silence, speaking seldom and then in an 
undertone as though some one he loved were dead. 
Everybody else, too, seemed to talk in whispers, not 
daring to make any effort to break the ghastly silence 
that surrounded the Palace like a chilly winter atmo- 
sphere. The Empress, whose whole heart is wrapped 
up in the happiness of her husband and family, was in 
an agony of grief which she could hardly conceal in 
public. Her voice trembled when she made the simplest 
remark, there were always unshed tears in her tired, 
anxious blue eyes, she was nervous and restless and 
clung convulsively to her children. All the young 
Princes — the two at Plon and Prince Adalbert from Kiel — 



THE KAISER 157 

made short, hurried visits home, in the hope of distract- 
ing their father from the brooding grief into which he 
appeared to have sunk. The Emperor was wounded 
to his very heart's core, in his pride, his self-esteem, and 
his personal vanity, which received a blow from which 
it recovered but slowly. His popularity with his people, 
always very great, never sunk to such a low ebb as at 
that time. 

And if the Emperor and Court took so much to 
heart this estrangement of the public, the people them- 
selves were hardly less moved to grief. I remember 
calling to see some friends living in Potsdam at that 
time, just an ordinary German household of the pro- 
fessional class, and they were plunged into almost as 
deep a depression, absolutely broken-hearted at the 
idea that their Emperor, at a time when the German 
people's sympathies were whole-heartedly on the side 
of the Boers, had, by his own confession, been actively 
employed in measures designed to aid the English. 

- To show how very deeply chagrined these people 
were, and what a personal matter they made of the 
affair, a children's party which they had intended to 
give two days after the newspaper revelations, was 
cancelled at the last moment, the parents declaring 
themselves utterly incapable of indulging in any fes- 
tivities — even children's festivities — at such a sad time 
for Germany. And this attitude of mind was shared 
by many other Germans whom I met whose confidence 
in their Emperor was for the time very rudely shaken. 



158 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

I was at Wildpark station, waiting to meet a friend 
coming from Berlin, when Prince von Bulow, wearing 
full-dress military uniform, descended from the train, 
and, accompanied by one of the Emperor's adjutants 
who had been sent to meet him, was driven to the New 
Palace for that fateful interview in which he was pledged 
to wring from the Kaiser a promise to abstain in the 
future from further " revelations " to the Press. An 
enormous crowd was gathered on the platform, many 
of them journalists, and as the Prince passed through 
them to the Royal carriage, which was waiting outside, 
all hats went off and a cheer was raised, only to be 
immediately quenched, for the occasion was felt to be 
too solemn for such demonstrations. 

There can be no doubt that this incident was the 
real " beginning of the end " of Prince Billow's Chan- 
cellorship, although it was only in the following year, 
ostensibly over the finance reform measure, that he 
resigned and was succeeded by Bethmann-Hollweg, 
whose first name, it may interest people to know who 
do not read German, is pronounced exactly like the 
English name, " Bateman." 

Prince Billow's retirement was a great loss to the 
German Empire in many ways, but chiefly because his 
personality was one that corrected and restrained much 
of the exuberance in that of the Emperor. He and his 
charming Italian wife dined frequently at the Royal 
table. The Princess was small and lively and wore 
diaphanous artistic gowns, which somewhat scandalized 



THE KAISER 159 

the Court ladies, who were invariably clad in sober 
silks and satins of an unblemished respectability of 
design. Once, when an Italian royalty was visiting the 
Prussian Court, — it was in the days of slit dresses, very 
tight round the ankles, and no " undies " to speak of, — 
one of the Hof-Damen of the Empress was so distressed 
at the revelations of the Italian ladies' lower limbs, that 
she seriously proposed, and was with some difficulty 
restrained from sending to each delinquent's room a 
" tempestuous petticoat " borrowed from the house- 
maids. 

Prince Bulow was a man of the world and of large 
diplomatic experience. He possessed great charm and 
urbanity of manner, and knew how to amuse and keep 
the Emperor in a good temper, and his abilities were 
perhaps greater than is generally known. The diffi- 
culties of his position have probably never been com- 
pletely realized by those unacquainted with the Emperor's 
restless temperament. 

Though William needs a very clever man to manage 
him, yet he dislikes any cleverness that is likely to 
come into collision with his own ideas. He is still, as 
ever, the monarch who dismissed Bismarck — the greatest 
German of his age, also, it may be, the least scrupulous. 

The mediocrity of the men who surrounded the 
Emperor was marked. Probably no very clever man 
would wish to spend much of his time at Court, and the 
officials had their time fully occupied in the performance 
of their respective functions. One man only of those 



160 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

officers who came and went, for they were not retained 
longer than two years, sometimes less, in the Kaiser's 
suite, seemed to possess conspicuous ability, and that 
of a somewhat dubious kind. A very plain man, an 
officer of about forty, with protruding eyes and a dis- 
agreeable expression, he was, generally speaking, disliked 
both by the members of the Kaiser's family and, as far 
as one could judge, by his fellow aides-de-camp. But he 
had great influence with the Emperor. They talked 
much together, always, from the scraps of conversation 
that one heard in passing, of things military or political 
— the man with a confident assertive tone and with a 
look of cunning in his sly eyes which was very repellent, 
while the monarch listened eagerly, obviously interested 
and convinced. Their talk, unlike the usual Court 
conversation, seemed always secretive, mysterious, and 
referred to other previous conversations. They retired 
into corners together or walked outside the windows 
apart from the rest. Nobody was sorry when at last 
the gentleman in question disappeared from Court and 
was next heard of in Turkey. 

One gentleman of the Empress's suite, Baron von 
Mirbach, an elderly man of the old school, would often 
openly deplore, much to the amusement of his mistress, 
the change in the German spirit, the commercialism, 
the absence of the old ideals. The others would tell 
him that it was the inevitable progress of the race, the 
eternal age-old incompatibility between the old and the 
new generation, but he would shake his head gravely. 



THE KAISER 161 

He made valiant attempts to stem the growing tide of 
irreligion which is so conspicuous in Germany. 

" Our Fatherland," he said one day to me, " is day 
by day losing its faith. What have we to put in its 
place ? The new generation is self-seeking, self-sufficient 
— our young Princes think only of their own enjoyment ; 
they demand the privileges of their rank while they 
shirk its responsibilities. We need in them something 
more than a capacity to smile and be affable. They 
must have character. Have they got it ? " 

Herr von Mirbach's wife was a very charming, culti- 
vated woman of Belgian nationality, who frequently 
came to Court, and often rode on horseback with the 
Empress, who liked her very much. 

It was due to the efforts of the Baron that many new 
churches were built in Berlin and its environs. One of 
the finest among them, which to a certain extent canonized 
the old Emperor, the Kaiser's grandfather, was called 
the Emperor- William-Memorial Church, and was fre- 
quently attended by the Empress and her daughter. 

The Mistress of the Robes to the Prussian Court, 
Countess Therese von Brockdorff, sat as model of one 
of the saints in its stained-glass windows. 

It was very rarely indeed that any actual criticism 

of the Emperor's acts was heard in the Palace itself, 

but one gentleman, who occasionally permitted himself 

a certain licence in this respect, once said to me, in 

reference to some indiscretion of his " all-highest " 

master, "He is just like a child with a handful of 
n 



162 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

squibs. He throws them about and likes to hear the 
noise they make. Some day one of them will fall into 
a powder magazine and then he will be dreadfully 
surprised at the mess he has caused." 

I was rather surprised that he permitted himself to 
say so much, for it was always a dangerous thing to air 
any personal convictions of that kind. They had a 
way of being whispered from mouth to mouth, and at 
Court it seemed to me that people " gave each other 
away " with a freedom quite unknown elsewhere. In 
no place was silence of such pure gold as in that centre 
of gossip where the very emptiness and want of intel- 
lectuality in the air made the discussion of other people's 
sayings and ideas of quite an exaggerated importance. 
Even the Empress herself noticed this one day and 
complained of it. 

" I cannot make the merest idle remark," she said, 
" as to what I like or dislike, just perhaps when I am 
in a passing mood, but everybody seizes on it as an 
expression of opinion and it is quoted everywhere. I 
am really frightened to say anything for fear of the 
unnecessary importance given to my remarks. If I 
say that I think I would perhaps like to do a thing, 
then it is as though I had actually given an order to 
have it done." 

Then she turned to me and said laughingly, " I know 
now how your English king felt when he expressed a 
hasty desire to get rid of Becket, and found to his surprise 
that he had been taken at his word." 



THE KAISER 163 

Once when one of the Court gentlemen was chatting 
informally with some of the ladies in their sitting-room, 
he referred to Elinor d'Olbreuse, that lovely young 
French lady of inferior birth whom a certain German, 
Duke George of Zell, took to wife and who was the an- 
cestress of Queen Victoria, the Kaiser, and several other 
of the crowned heads of Europe. 

The Emperor, whose ideas on the divinity of kings are 
not so self-evident to his subjects as they are to himself, 
had been discussing at table his illustrious ancestors, 
and was highly amused because one of the ladies of the 
Court had laid claim to one of his forefathers as also her 
own, a highly probable and easily proved fact. But it 
had appeared extraordinarily laughable to the Emperor. 

" I suppose we must call each other ' dear cousin ' 
in future," he had said. 

" I should have liked to remind him of Elinor 
d'Olbreuse," said the Count. 

" He probably does not know about her," remarked 
some one else who was present. 

" Oh, he knows," was the answer, " but he ignores ; 
he does not allow himself to believe it. He only accepts 
as facts those things which he desires to be true. The 
idea that the blood of a French dancer runs in his veins 
would be highly unpleasing." 

" But," objected some one else, " every royal family 
has large mixtures of plebeian blood if one goes far 
enough back. In mediaeval times kings often took wives 
without regard to their birth." 



164 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

" Quite true. But the Emperor shuts his eyes to 
facts. He likes to believe that the Hohenzollerns de- 
scended straight from heaven." 

As is well known, the Emperor has been the means of 
bringing to light upon the stage of the Berlin Opera 
many musical works which would have been better left 
in oblivion. The Berlin public steadily refuse to go and 
listen to them, but, nothing daunted by his ill-success, 
the Emperor hopes that future generations will endorse 
his taste. 

Once, when His Majesty was very much occupied 
with the rehearsals for " Der lange Kerl," an opera 
which no musical critic in Berlin deigned to notice, he 
talked volubly at table of another work written by one 
of his aides-de-camp who was a man of educated musical 
taste and a very good performer on various instruments. 
The Intendant of the Opera House had spoken very 
favourably of the work, and the author asked to be 
allowed to play some extracts from it to the Kaiser, who, 
however, as he told the assembled table, refused to offer 
any hope that it would ever be performed in public, 
his chief objection to it being that it was " so strongly 
reminiscent of Wagner." 

" Well," whispered the officer sitting next to me, 
" that can never be said of the opera in which His 
Majesty is at present interested." 

William's belief in his own ability as a discoverer 
of musical talent was deplorable in many respects. It 
effectually prevented any real modern masterpieces 



THE KAISER 165 

from appearing for the first time in Berlin, and con- 
tinually plunged the unfortunate Intendant of the 
Opera into terrible expenses for new costumes and 
scenery, for works which were sheer failures both from 
a financial and artistic point of view. 

The Emperor was very optimistic in character, and 
could always persuade himself that what he wished to be 
would be. 

That his early English associations had given him a 
taste for English life and a love of English literature is 
true, but he was essentially un-English in his mode of 
thought, the inner meaning of our English spirit was 
eternally a sealed book to him. English ideas of liberty 
were to him ridiculous, and our English public-school 
life, " where you devote all your energies to games," was 
in his idea just a foolish waste of time. The manliness 
and self-reliance, the sense of responsibility, all the better 
features of a system with many imperfections, altogether 
escaped him. This is hardly to be wondered at, for it 
has escaped a good many other Germans ; and when it is 
considered that as a child the then young Prince William 
was given over at a very early age into the hands of 
German tutors, all anxious to eradicate in him the last 
drop of English blood ; that England's weaknesses rather 
than her strong points were insisted upon ; that his 
grandfather, the old Kaiser, had a passionate love of this 
his first grandson, and that there was, as is so often the 
case, more sympathy between the old man and the boy 
than between the latter and his parents, one sees how 



166 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

unlikely it was, in spite of his frequent visits to " Grand- 
mamma at Windsor," where he met numerous youthful 
uncles, that he should grow up with anything but a 
superficial though wide knowledge of the British spirit. 

He was very fond of talking about Windsor, and what 
he appeared to like in his visits to England was the 
simplicity, combined with the unconscious effortless ease 
and comfort, which is a part of English life. Perhaps 
only those who know the country life of Germany can 
properly appreciate that of England. 

The Emperor's somewhat unrestrained admiration 
of this phase of English existence was always heard 
somewhat resentfully by his Court. They did not like 
their Sovereign's outspoken praise of other ways of living 
than of theirs in the Fatherland, and his efforts to intro- 
duce them into the social life of Germany were met with 
a sturdy, if tacit, opposition. All ideas of luxury were 
supposed to be " English," while simplicity and economy 
were echt Deutsch. 

The Emperor's character always appeared to me in 
the light of a misdirected force. It was like lightning, 
liable to strike anywhere at random and do incalculable 
mischief, when it might have been, like a controlled 
current of electricity, utilized for splendid purposes. 
In spite of his strength of will, his self-assurance and 
vanity made him peculiarly vulnerable to the influence 
of clever, unscrupulous people who knew how to use 
these weaknesses of his for the furtherance of their 
own purposes. 



THE KAISER 167 

The Emperor's great desire was to see Germany 
advance in influence and power, and his peculiar trans- 
parency of mind allowed every one to see that he clearly 
believed it was owing to his own personal efforts that the 
progress of his country was due. He reminded one of 
the fly on the wheel who believes that he makes it go 
round. 

The Emperor's custom of " critique " after a military 
review, when he made a speech to the assembled generals 
telling them what was right and wrong in the manoeuvres, 
was, generally speaking, much ridiculed among military 
circles. They listened to it, however, with exemplary 
outward respect and inward boredom and contempt. 
They attached no value whatever to His Majesty's 
remarks. 

The Emperor possesses an indomitable will joined to 
a firm belief in his destiny as the guide of his people. 
His love of the picturesque and dramatic he employs 
sometimes to good purpose, while at others he uses it 
only to draw ridicule upon himself. He believes in 
impressing his people by outward show, and if he thinks 
they cannot see the manifest advantages of his rule, 
takes pains that they shall be suitably instructed in it. 
He believes in winning the hearts of the rising generation, 
and shows himself as often as he can to the enthusiastic 
youth of his capital, granting them frequent holidays. 

That he spares no trouble to forward, that he believes 
himself to be indispensable to the success of every 
national effort, of whatever kind, is a principle of his 



168 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

character. At Frankfort, where there was a three 
days' musical contest, he and his consort were present 
the greater part of the time. 

"We heard one song no less than thirty-five times," 
complained the poor tired Empress, who makes no pre- 
tensions to being musical. 

But William decided as to which was the best choir 
and handed them the prize, quite undeterred by his 
utter lack of technical knowledge. 

Once and only once I have seen the Emperor con- 
ducting a band, or, more strictly speaking, " beating the 
air " ; but the faces of the performers were the most inter- 
esting part of the spectacle. 

Some of the sons of the Emperor have inherited more 
than others the belief that what they do is admirable. 
One of them of certain mediocre artistic tastes had a 
mania for making crude and feeble sketches and pre- 
senting them, with doubtless kind intentions, to any 
lady or gentleman whom he thought fit to honour. 

" What a pity," sighed one of the ladies of the Court, 
looking through her pince-nez at one of these master- 
pieces which the Royal artist had just thrust into her 
hand, " what a pity that our young Princes think so 
much of everything they do themselves. They never 
seem to compare it with what others do, but believe it 
to be admirable because they did it." 

"Ah," some one made answer, "but that is a well- 
known Hohenzollern trait of character, the belief that 
what they do is intrinsically superior to what others 



THE KAISER 169 

can do. They think that they can accomplish without 
pains what others achieve by endless hard work." 

And it was a continual surprise how little sense of 
proportion the family had in measuring the qualities of 
their own performances in the realms of art, seeming to 
look upon a taste for painting, music, or literature as in 
itself a qualification, and altogether ignoring the necessity 
of training and continuous application. 

Though independent and unconventional — I will not 
say original — in his mode of thought, the Emperor is 
prone to resent a similar independence in others if it 
opposes his own cherished ideas and opinions. He 
imagines himself to be more liberal-minded than he 
really is, and has a marvellous capacity for assimilating, 
for a short time only, the spirit of any book he has read, 
the ideas of any person he has met, which for the time 
impress him with their truth or strike his imagination. 
He has a phenomenal memory for facts and a talent for 
seizing the most interesting — not necessarily the most 
important — points of any subject under discussion. 
But his thought is, unfortunately, essentially superficial 
and his deductions often glaringly false. 

When Moltke observed that "It is a pious and 
patriotic duty never to disturb the prestige which 
connects the glory of our army with certain high per- 
sonages," he made a remark which echoes in the breast 
of every loyal German subject. 

" Er is dock der Kaiser " — " But he is the Emperor." 
This is the answer almost invariably heard at any 



170 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

attempt to criticize the actions of the Imperial master 
of Germany. 

Doubtless the comparative newness of the German 
Empire, the conflicting temperaments and ideals of the 
various states which compose it, the past wars between 
them which have left their usual aftermath of bitterness, 
have created among responsible people the feeling of 
accomplishing " a pious and patriotic duty " when they 
allow their ruler to wear the laurels earned by humbler 
men, to place to his account the rich result of the work 
and self-sacrifice of others. It appeared to me, in those 
days when I lived in Germany, to be a fine and estimable 
trait in the German character. 



CHAPTER X 
FREDERICK THE GREAT AND HIS FATHER 

IT is difficult for English people to realize with 
what passionate enthusiasm and full conscious- 
ness of its value as an inspiration for the present 
and future times, the teaching of history is carried out 
in Germany. None of the judicial calm and tepid 
praise of the heroes and empire-builders of the past, 
which pervades our own school-books, is to be found 
in the histories supplied to German schools. They are 
written with the obvious and praiseworthy idea of 
arousing in the growing generation the desire to carry 
on the work begun by men of a past age, and especially 
are they written with the view of convincing them that 
without the God-given blessing of the Hohenzollern race 
on the Prussian throne none of the past glories of the 
German race would have been possible. 

" Oh yes, you are right in England to be democratic. 
With you it is the people who have done everything, 
with us in Germany it is our rulers who have done all, 
that is why we look to the Kaiser for a lead. In England 
your King has no power, you are practically a republic. 

Here the Kaiser is the supreme power. Our people 

171 



172 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

have no capacity for rule. It would be nothing but 
confusion and jangling if the power were not in one 
hand. We do not understand here what you call party 
government and calling each other disagreeable names 
at elections. We should not like it. We prefer our 
own methods. The Socialists ? Oh, of course, the 
Socialists are all right too. They voice the wrongs of 
the people and give an impression that they are of 
importance. The Socialist vote ? Well, it may be in- 
creasing, but after all the power — the real power — it all 
lies in the throne — in the Emperor's hands — the Socialists 
don't really count as much as they appear to do." 

The speaker was a rather cynical, middle-aged man, 
holding a small office at Court, with whom I frequently 
found myself falling into interesting political discussions 
in which we invariably disagreed as to ultimate issues, 
but he only echoed what every one else said when he 
remarked that in Germany the people had, historically, 
done nothing, the rulers everything. I learned to 
recognize it as one of the stereotyped phrases which 
one encounters with rather irritating persistence in 
Germany. It is infinitely tedious to meet in Pomerania 
with the very same idea, clothed in the same words, and 
uttered with the same intonation and expression of 
countenance which one has already heard in Hanover 
and in South Germany, especially if there are sufficient 
reasons for doubting its absolute accuracy. 

" But," I objected one day, not altogether in a pure 
spirit of obstinacy, " I do not think that this is true. 



FREDERICK THE GREAT AND HIS FATHER 173 

The German people have always shown as much initiative 
as those of other nations, but the rulers have invariably 
got the credit. There was the War of Liberation, for 
example, when Prussia was crushed under Napoleon. It 
was the people, not the Prussian King, who made the 
first effort at independence. There were splendid 
patriots and leaders among the people. What about 
Schamhorst and Stein and the Tugend-Bund ? The King 
did nothing then — the people everything — it was only 
later on that the King was roused by the efforts of the 
people." 

The man — he was a schoolmaster this time — looked 
positively uncomfortable and nonplussed. He was 
evidently unused to any other point of view than the 
one indicated ; he hesitated and perpended. 

" Of course, Queen Louise made up a good deal for 
her husband's shortcomings," I continued, " but her 
efforts would have been in vain without the help of the 
people." 

" Oh yes," he said, his face brightening. " Yes, you 
see, it was Queen Louise who saved Prussia." He was 
obviously relieved to be able to find that after all it was 
a Royalty who had come to the rescue. 

" But Schamhorst," I urged, " he was the son of a 
farmer, wasn't he ? Not even of Prussian birth but a 
Hanoverian. He reformed the army which afterwards 
beat Napoleon — and Stein ? It was because he saw 
that the peasants were too much ground down, that the 
Prussian people had no liberty under their rulers, were 



174 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

driven to fight without any enthusiasm for their 
cause " 

Here the schoolmaster looked uncomfortable and 
unhappy ; he did not know that I had been reading up 
about Stein. 

" That was the reason," I continued implacably, 
" of Napoleon's success, but as soon as Stein was given 
a free hand he liberated the people from serfdom and 
things went better. It was he who laid the foundations 
of the future greatness of Prussia." 

The schoolmaster laughed and abandoned further 
argument, remarking that he saw I was hochst demo- 
kratisch, which he appeared to find highly amusing in 
anyone living at the Prussian Court. 

I have already said that Carlyle's " History of 
Frederick the Great " was highly flattering to German 
susceptibilities, and all the officers with whom I discussed 
it (I never yet met with one who had read it in the 
original and very few in the German translation) were 
especially grateful to Carlyle for having discovered the 
virtues of the father of Frederick the Great, whom, in 
spite of the approving things said about him by his 
biographer, I always maintained to be a most disagree- 
able, brow-beating, merely brutal person who had tried 
to stifle rather than to develop the best qualities of his 
son, and with the greatest difficulty been restrained 
from ordering his execution. 

Every Prussian officer, every Prussian schoolmaster 
I ever met, invariably maintained, with all the force of 




WILLIAM II IN CORFU, SHOWING COUNT BULOW THE REMAINS 
OF A RECENTLY-DISCOVERED ANCIENT GREEK TEMPLE 



FREDERICK THE GREAT AND HIS FATHER 175 

soul and body at his command, that the military capacity, 
the strength of will, tenacity of purpose and far-sighted 
sagacity and splendid statesmanship of Frederick the 
Great were the direct fruits of his father's harsh treat- 
ment, and would never have ripened to ultimate maturity 
if those other less desirable traits of character, his tastes 
for French literature, French dress, French music and 
musicians, French wigs and amusements had not been 
stamped upon in early youth by his heavy-footed parent ; 
if in childhood and youth his spirit had not been crushed, 
broken indeed, by constant grinding military discipline, 
by the continual performance of irksome unnecessary 
tasks, by separation from the society of those he loved. 
The stern, relentless subordination to the grim purpose 
and reality of life of all childish dreams, desires, and 
yearnings, is still exacted by the Prussian military 
martinet, who believes that in no other way can a boy 
be made into a satisfactory soldier. 

So the methods of that inflexible arbitrarily despotic 
personage of Spartan habits, Frederick William I, the 
famous father of his more famous son, Frederick the 
Great, who long ago laid down the lines on which all 
Hohenzollern Princes should be educated, are still pursued 
in Germany. 

Carlyle describes this Prussian King, grandson of 
the Great Elector, with his " rather copious cheeks and 
jaws ; nose smallish, inclined to be stumpy " ; as he 
strides along in his blue military coat, buff waistcoat and 
breeches, and white linen gaiters, carrying in his hand 



176 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

the thick bamboo cane which he does not hesitate to 
lay on anyone — wife, children, subjects — who incurs his 
displeasure. A very intolerant, explosive personage, with 
strong hatreds and uncontrollable impulses, driving by 
the force of his personality all the thousand feebler 
spirits like chaff before the wind. 

Although never able to spell nor express himself 
correctly — spelling was probably to him one of those 
purely ornamental accomplishments for which he had 
no use — he had decided views on education, which he 
committed to paper voluminously for the guidance of his 
son's tutors. When little Fritz, the future Frederick 
the Great, had reached the age of seven, he was taken 
out of the hands of the womenfolk, away from his 
beloved French governess who had found him " an 
angel for disposition and a marvel in learning," from the 
society of his little sisters, and given over to the care of 
three military gentlemen — one Duhan, the practical 
teacher ; the other two officers of high rank who have 
been in many wars and had a good deal of useful ex- 
perience of life — men whom the little boy grows very 
fond of as time goes on, continuing to show marks of his 
esteem in after years. Their general instructions are 
" to infuse useful knowledge, reject useless, and wind 
up the whole into a military finish." On week-days 
the little Prince is to be called at six — no loitering in 
bed allowed, but briskly and at once get up ; say his 
prayers "so as all in the room may hear him, then as 
quickly as possible wash himself (but not with soap) and 



FREDERICK THE GREAT AND HIS FATHER 177 

dress, he shall take breakfast while his hair is being 

combed and queued (not yet powdered) so that both 

jobs go on at once, and all this shall be ended before 

half -past six." Economy of time loomed large in 

Frederick William's scheme of education : " Accustom 

him to get in and out of his clothes as fast as humanly 

possible," yet he shall by no means be slovenly. " Let 

him learn to put his clothes on and off by himself, and 

to be clean and neat, and not so dirty." After the 

toilette is finished, prayers are read from half-past six 

to seven, " at which all the servants must be present." 

At seven begins a history lesson which lasts till nine ; 

then arrives a clerical gentleman from Berlin (twice a 

week) and teaches little Fritz the Christian religion till 

a quarter to eleven, when he is released to wash his 

hands (this time with soap), have his hair powdered, 

put on his little coat — he has been wearing a short 

dressing-gown till now — and come to the King his father 

about eleven. With him he remains, walking, riding, 

and dining, till two, when — His Majesty at that time 

being slumberous — Fritz is sent back to his tutors, and 

lessons begin again. Maps and geography this time, 

with an account of all the European kingdoms, from two 

to three ; then Duhan for the next hour treats of morality, 

and from four to five German writing is practised " to 

see that he gets a good style," which, inheriting the 

paternal disability, he never does. At five Fritz 

shall wash his hands, " and divert himself in the air, 

not in his room, do what he likes if it is not against 
12 



178 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

God." Sometimes he has ciphering and writing of 
French letters, and though it is reported that the little 
Crown Prince learned with extraordinary rapidity, yet 
spelling, punctuation — he scatters commas "as if," 
says Carlyle, " they were shaken out of a pepper-box 
upon his page " — and the higher mysteries of grammar 
were to him ever unachievable. 

Papa takes him on his annual reviews, on his hunts, 
which the little Prince detests, finding no pleasure in 
shooting partridges and boar-baiting, " with," as he 
remarks, " such an expenditure of industry and damage 
to seed-fields." The boy would prefer to play the flute 
which Rentzel, his drill-sergeant, has taught him, or 
spend a little time with his mamma or his beloved Wilhel- 
mina, the bright, witty sister — throughout his life the one 
woman possessing his entire confidence and esteem. 

At nine years of age the little Prince — to encourage 
his military tastes, not yet strikingly in evidence — has 
a miniature company of schoolboys, a hundred and ten 
strong, with whom he is daily drilled, and a small 
arsenal is made and mounted for him, and he learns to 
fire off exceedingly small brass ordnance. From the age 
of ten he is a full-fledged soldier, and studies more and 
more fortification and artillery — Latin he is spared as 
being of the useless lumber of accomplishments — of no 
practical service to any man, — but more and more shall 
he learn geography, history, " with considerations 
made upon the causes of events," and frugality, activity, 
exactitude are to be hourly inculcated. Until he is 



FREDERICK THE GREAT AND HIS FATHER 179 

seventeen his pocket-money is about eighteenpence a 
month, while incidental expenses for hair-tape, for 
mending the flute, for tips to housemaids and postilions, 
for collections at church, averaged £3 10s. od. — not a 
large amount for the disbursements of the heir to the 
throne. 

Fritz seems to have been fairly happy over his studies. 
Duhan was a sensible man who had a knack of softening 
the rigours of existence ; but in religion, the dreary 
catechisms and soul-drillings of two clerical gentlemen 
who try to instil their dark doctrines into the bright 
young boy result only in a sense of weariness and 
stupidity. 

As might be expected, things forbidden become 
alluring. Latin appears a most desirable language, and 
is being surreptitiously acquired after a fashion, till one 
fine day Papa enters unexpectedly and, flourishing his 
redoubtable cane, sends off the terrified teacher and 
finishes the Latin for that time. 

Unfortunately the tastes of young Fritz for Latin, 
music, French wigs, and finery begin to be a sad torment 
to his Prussian Majesty, who fears that the future of his 
kingdom is in the hands of a ne'er-do-weel. His treat- 
ment of his son grows harsher and more peremptory, and 
the Prince is given constant military duty — imprisoned 
in a pipe-clay element, a prey to vacancy, tedium, and 
longings, while in the background looms ever darker 
the shadow of his father's displeasure. He sends a 
humble petition begging his " dear Papa's forgiveness," 



i8o MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

pleading that the " cruel hatred of himself which he 
perceives in all his Papa's actions may cease." The 
stern parent, quite undisarmed by the submissive tone 
of the letter, seems, on the contrary, to have been lashed 
by its docility into fresh fury, and in very incoherent 
ill-spelt German sends his son a raging answer in which 
he upbraids him for being an " efeminierter Kerl " who 
has no human inclinations, who is not ashamed not to 
be able to ride or shoot, and is also dirty in his person 
(malpropre an seinem Leibe) and " curls his hair like a 
fool, instead of cutting it, all of which I have spoken 
of thousands of times, but all in vain, and there is no 
improvement in anything. Besides that, proud as 
Lucifer, speaks with nobody except a few, and pulls 
faces like a fool, does my will in nothing except by force, 
— nothing from love, and has no desire to do anything 
but follow his own desires — nothing except what is 
useless. This is the answer." 

Can we not see the choleric Papa flinging himself in 
a fury into his hard wooden chair — for cushions and 
carpets and such dust-holding furniture he will not 
suffer — seizing a goose-quill and dashing off these lines 
to the boy anxiously waiting at Potsdam for ever so 
little sign of relenting on his father's part. Meantime 
the Crown Prince begins to be known for his wit, his 
literary tastes, his frank, ingenuous ways, but no one 
dare praise him for these things in the hearing of the 
stern rhadamanthine parent who presently, under the 
stirring preaching of a certain divine, develops a quaint 



FREDERICK THE GREAT AND HIS FATHER 181 

religious enthusiasm and contemplates retirement from 
the world of politics and state, proposing to manage his 
farm by the aid of his wife and daughters, one of whom 
is to mend the linen while another, " who is miserly," 
is to keep charge of the stores, and Charlotte, aged twelve, 
" shall go to market and buy our provisions " — idyllic 
occupations for future Queens. The religious mood, 
having wrought its allotted quantum of discomfort to 
family and Court, passed, and the psalm-singing and 
sermons reassumed normal proportions. All readers 
of history know of the unhappy years for the Crown 
Prince that followed, of the thwarted marriage with 
his English cousin, of the brutal blows and ill-treatment 
which goaded him to his ill-advised attempted flight to 
England, of his imprisonment, of the execution under 
his prison windows of his friend Katte, of his own danger 
of a similar fate — such was his father's uncontrollable 
fury — of his fifteen weary months of expiation in Kustrin, 
where, deprived of his uniform as unworthy to wear it, 
he is made to study economics and agriculture, and 
expected to show, by abject submission, his penitence for 
past misdeeds. By degrees he manages to obtain some 
amelioration of his lot, his beloved flute is smuggled in 
to him, also his French books, and he receives clandestine 
letters from Mamma and Wilhemina. To conciliate his 
father, he consents to marry a woman he does not love, 
and though making an honourable effort to live happily 
with her, in a few years, wearied with her insufferable 
insipidities, gives up the useless struggle and leaves her 



182 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

alone to her trivial existence. The youthful days of the 
greatest of Prussian kings is one long tragedy which 
overshadows the rest of his life with its bitter memories. 

" My youth," he writes in after years, " was a school 
of suffering " ; and " Religion and Love belong above 
all things to the upbringing of Princes." 

I once accompanied the Empress and the ladies of 
the Court to Konigs-Wusterhausen, the small, dreary, 
ugly, inconvenient Schloss to which Frederick William I 
was wont to retire from time to time from Berlin — 
distant some twenty miles — together with his wife, 
Sophie Charlotte, a daughter of George I of England and 
Hanover, and his family of ten children. The King 
and Queen of Prussia had had fourteen, but three little 
princes and one princess were not able to survive the 
strange treatment of the children of those days. The 
eldest daughter, afterwards Wilhelmina of Bayreuth, 
wrote the famous " Memoirs," which depict in no dubious 
fashion the severity and brutality of her Royal father, 
not shrinking even from accusing him, doubtless with 
perfect truth — in spite of Carlyle's scepticism on the 
subject — of throwing the dinner plates at his wife and 
children when, as frequently happened, their conduct 
was displeasing to him. That on two occasions he was 
with difficulty restrained from taking the life of his 
afterwards famous son, Frederick the Great, is a well- 
known historical fact, and that he indulged in fits of 
brutal savagery in which those nearest to him were the 
victims of his unrestrained anger is also not to be denied. 



FREDERICK THE GREAT AND HIS FATHER 183 

Of his love of economy, especially other people's 
economies, his hatred of outside parade and show, his 
delight in savage and degrading sport, and his selfish 
desire for his own comfort regardless of that of his family, 
there is ample evidence. He was by no means a lovable 
personality, but since Carlyle wrote his famous book 
he has been held up to the admiration of the German 
people as an example worthy to be followed, and his 
treatment of his children is not only condoned but 
commended as the only suitable method of dealing with 
the rising generation if it is desired to develop in them 
the strength of mind, the courage, and iron determination 
which it is desirable to see in every son of the Fatherland. 
So that Frederick William I has been raised on to a 
fairly high pedestal as a national hero, and his well- 
known partiality for extremely tall soldiers, which he 
obtained by many nefarious and cruel methods, has been 
regarded in the light of pure military zeal for the needs 
of the army. 

On this occasion of my visit to Wusterhausen, I was 
naturally very keenly interested in this little hunting- 
castle, which has been left practically untouched since 
those days, one hundred and seventy-five years ago, 
when the King, after spending his last shooting season 
there somewhat dismally, chained by illness to his bed, 
finally quitted it for ever, returning to Berlin for the few 
remaining months of his life. 

It looked, even on that pleasant sunny afternoon, 
when the flat meadows around it, the woods on the 



184 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

horizon, lay bathed in alternate light and shadow, a 
rather dismal place, thickly overgrown with the trees 
planted in the courtyard where the old monarch loved 
to sit by the fountain and smoke with his counsellors, 
the old Dessauer, Grumkow, and others. The branches 
have grown close to the windows and intercept the light 
and air. Inside, it was dark and dull and melancholy, 
as uninhabited rooms forlorn of human intercourse are 
apt to look. The furniture was stiff, solid, and uncom- 
fortable. There were none of the beautiful French 
sideboards and couches which are to be seen in the 
palaces of Potsdam and Berlin. One chair was shown 
to us in which the King was accustomed to sleep when 
troubled with gout and unable to rest in bed. There 
was also the Roll-Stuhl, in which he was wheeled about 
from room to room. 

On the wall hung various oil-paintings, the products 
of the King's brush, portraits of unfortunate gentlemen- 
in-waiting whom one could imagine tremblingly sitting 
to the Royal limner. If one may judge by the expression 
of their faces they found it a painful ordeal. The quality 
of the artistic talent of Frederick William was of a similar 
kind to that with which we are familiar in signboards of 
public-houses. It was direct and naive as that of a 
schoolboy, and ignored both the rules of perspective 
and the laws of light and shade. But much may be 
excused of an art exercised chiefly as a diversion from 
the sufferings occasioned by frequent attacks of gout. 
On the back of one of the paintings is inscribed in the 



FREDERICK THE GREAT AND HIS FATHER 185 

King's handwriting, " Painted in torment. June 14, 

1730." 

One lady who had accompanied the Empress — she 
was not one of the regular suite, but had formerly, 
before her marriage, held a position at Court — was full 
of admiration of the "wonderful gift," as she called it, 
of the Prussian King, and professed to find in the wooden 
features and queerly daubed periwigs of the portraits 
some undeveloped mine of artistic wealth. 

" But, Grafin," remonstrated the Empress, who, not 
having been born a Hohenzollern and a Prussian, viewed 
the pictures with unprejudiced eyes, "they are really 
frightful. Of course when anyone suffers from gout he 
can be allowed to do anything that would keep him in 
a comparatively good temper, but I never heard of 
anyone admiring the pictures as works of art." 

The Empress, ushered by the Kastellan, entered 
another room accompanied by most of the suite, but 
the lady who had praised the paintings lingered behind 
with me. 

" I don't care what the Empress says," she remarked 
rebelliously, laying the picture down again on the table — 
it was small in size, painted on a wooden panel — " I find 
it ganz nett." 

"Quite nice," I echoed. "One is glad to find him 
capable of anything so human as a taste for painting bad 
pictures, he who was so set on people never doing any- 
thing that was not of direct use to the State, only I can't 
understand how he could then refuse to let his son — 



186 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

poor, unfortunate Frederick — learn to play the flute. 
He appeared to thwart his children and indulge him- 
self." 

" Ah, but all that harshness and severity — see what 
it did for Frederick ! " Here she closed her hand tightly 
together, making it into a fist and shaking it slightly. 
" It was that that made him great, that gave 
him " 

"Oh, how can you say that," I interposed, "when 
you can read in every line of Frederick's letters which 
he wrote when he grew older how he deplored that his 
childhood and youth had been so maimed and crushed 
by the lack of sympathy and affection ? " 

" No, indeed, he would have grown up just a foolish, 
flute-playing, frivolous good-for-nothing," continued the 
Countess, "if it had not been for his father's firmness 
and determination to make him a good soldier." 

"Yes, I know, always drilling and pipeclay," I 
interposed ; " enough to make him detest the army — 
he did detest it, he says so himself — anybody would do 
when they had to grind at it from morning till night 
as he did — all the machine-made, all the soul-destroying 
part ! " 

The Countess laughed. She was a kind-hearted soul, 
incapable of anything but goodness and charity to 
others, but she was firmly convinced of the virtues of 
unmitigated harshness in developing the correct military 
spirit. Had it not led to the rise of Prussia among 
European States, to all the glory that followed ? 



FREDERICK THE GREAT AND HIS FATHER 187 

Every German child is taught the same thing, every 
Prussian prince is at the present day educated much 
on the same lines as was Frederick the Great himself, 
taken away from feminine ministrations at the age of 
seven, given into the hands of a young officer whose 
business it is to bring him up under strict military 
tutelage. His tender plastic mind, at the most impres- 
sionable, most susceptible age, is henceforth chiefly 
surrounded by martial influences, is encouraged above 
all things to believe that the most honourable, the most 
necessary career for him is that of a soldier. 

Many tragedies might be revealed of the results of 
this implacable law of the House of Hohenzollern, of the 
fights and struggles of parents against the influence or 
the methods of the military governor. There is no more 
fruitful cause of domestic discomfort in royal families than 
this one. 

I remember a family, a distant connexion of the 
Emperor, in whom the quarrels and disputes between 
the governor of the young princes and their parents 
were never-ceasing, and often, to outsiders, of an ex- 
tremely petty and vindictive nature. One heard con- 
tinually of the extraordinary subjects of dispute and 
the constant fighting that took place between the 
governor, determined to bring up his princes in the 
good old-fashioned Spartan method, and the parents, 
especially the mother, who was imbued with the idea 
that her children were her own, and should be brought 
up as she considered best. She had been much in 



188 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

England and encouraged her children to practise every 
kind of English sport in which she herself took 
part. 

But the military governor knew nothing of English 
sport, and found that his two princes were lamentably 
backward in their studies, for they were not gifted with 
the type of brain which acquires book-learning with 
facility. In fact, for their ages they were much below 
the standard to which all German children must attain or 
suffer much unhappiness. There is nothing in Germany 
which is so pitiable as a boy — especially if he happens 
to be a prince — who is not gifted with a capacity for 
book-learning. No matter what other qualifications 
of mind and body he may possess, if he cannot learn 
what his instructors have decided that he must learn, 
he will suffer intolerably, he will be deprived of most of 
his few hours of recreation, and made to feel that he is 
indelibly disgracing himself. His life will be a misery 
and he will be treated as an unworthy outcast. 

The military governor was a martinet of the first 
water. He believed the " English sports " were the 
cause of the backwardness of his princes, and forthwith 
he banished the hockey sticks, the footballs, the cricket 
bats — all those mysterious implements which he re- 
garded with ill-concealed dislike. With all the zeal of 
youth and complete ignorance of the mental and physical 
needs of children he set himself to drag the young minds 
committed to his charge, willingly or unwillingly, along 
the path of knowledge. He himself gave no lessons, 



FREDERICK THE GREAT AND HIS FATHER 189 

but he arranged the hours of study, and engaged the 
tutors. 

Long hours of unrelieved weariness stretched before 
the boys, who speedily lost any small interest which they 
had ever had in their lessons. 

But as no success followed his efforts, the princes 
remaining just as impermeable to mathematical and 
historical facts as they had been before, the indefatig- 
able governor determined that they should be altogether 
removed from the sphere of home influence, which he 
decided — perhaps with some reason — was not good for 
them, and the boys were sent, always accompanied by their 
governor, to a Kadetten-Anstalt, or military school, where 
the discipline is very strict and the life very hard-working 
and strenuous. The society of other boys was of great 
benefit in many directions but failed altogether as a 
stimulus to improved zeal in the matter of study. 
The princes were not lazy, they worked hard but accom- 
plished little. Their efforts were not guided by any 
innate intelligence, and — the chief asset for children in 
the acquisition of learning — a good memory was one of 
the qualities in which they were conspicuously deficient. 

" They can't remember anything — not the date of 
the Silesian wars, nor the Latin declensions, nor how 
much seven times five is ! " I once heard the irate 
governor declaim to a colleague. 

His efforts in one direction being thwarted, he deter- 
mined to strip the princes of all life's redundancies and 
to try if the Spartan severity and simplicity which in 



igo MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

his opinion had done so much to develop Frederick's 
character would not achieve similar results if applied in 
the case of his two princes. So he cut off Siissigkeiten 
of all kinds, meaning anything in the way of puddings 
or sweets at dinner, encouraging the poor little boys to 
refuse the tempting creams and Schokoladen-brei which 
were served at their parents' table when they came 
home on week-end visits, and he set his face relent- 
lessly against the superfluities of existence, among 
which he classed above all things dressing-gowns. 

" Dressing-gowns to Graf Finker are like a red rag to 
a bull," said one of the ladies attached to this princely 
household. "He has sent them back again here three 
times, and the Princess always returns them to the 
boys, and insists that they shall wear them when they 
go to the bathroom. Why need they be deprived of 
the ordinary comforts of existence ? What is the 
harm of dressing-gowns ? Our boys are manly and 
fond of outdoor life. They can beat all the others at 
games, but just because they are not as clever as some 
of them he descends to this petty form of persecution, 
as if it would make any difference." 

The battle of the dressing-gowns continued for some 
time longer, when somebody advanced the argument 
that Frederick the Great as a boy had always donned 
a dressing-gown in the mornings up till eleven o'clock, 
at which time his hair was powdered and he was per- 
mitted to exchange his gown for a coat. The governor, 
when he became aware of this historical fact, which up 



FREDERICK THE GREAT AND HIS FATHER 191 

to then he had ignored, withdrew any further opposi- 
tion, and so the matter was settled. 

And if Frederick the Great be the accepted model 
for the masculinity of Germany, Queen Louise afforded 
a no less excellent standard of various feminine virtues 
to the girls and women. She it was who defied Napoleon, 
was reviled and persecuted by him, who fled into exile 
with her children, and at last stimulated her feeble 
husband into making a stand against the conqueror. 

Perhaps we in England do not realize how intensely 
has been felt in Germany the disgrace of the time of 
Napoleon's occupation of their country, how the memory 
of it — in spite of the victories of 1 870-1 — still rankles 
in many a heart. The German does not possess the 
English knack of forgetting — is not indeed allowed to 
forget — what his country has once suffered from the 
invader. The hatred of the French nation in Germany 
always appeared to me to be kept alive of set purpose — 
stories of French cruelty and French oppression find 
place in all the reading-books of the schools. There 
was never any sign of any attempt at reconciliation, 
and Goethe's line " ein echter deutscher Mann mag 
keinen Franzen leiden " — "a true German hates a French- 
man " — has been used as the text to many a patriotic 
sermon. In this connexion I remember a small in- 
cident that appears to me rather illuminating. The 
Emperor's daughter, like every other German child I 
ever met, had inherited the national dislike of French 
people, and was not able to imagine the possibility of any 



192 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

of them possessing a single good quality. It is perhaps 
the view which most children, those ardent partisans, 
are likely to take of those who have been enemies of 
their country, and in Germany it is not considered well 
to teach children to perceive anything good in a nation 
which has so often fought against Germany. But 
when the Princess, an ardent reader of English, had 
finished Conan Doyle's " Exploits of Brigadier Gerard " 
she evidently revised some of her impressions of French- 
men and saw them in a new light, for in a book where 
she kept a list of the works she had read, and noted her 
opinion of their contents, — mere crude, childish impres- 
sions, but none the less interesting, — she wrote opposite 
to the title of the above-mentioned work : " In this book, 
for the first time I can see that Napoleon was very much 
beloved by his soldiers, and that it is quite possible that 
there were some quite nice Frenchmen in those days." 

Later on, when a French lady was appointed as her 
governess, — the first Frenchwoman who had been at the 
Prussian Court since the war of 1870-1, — the Princess, 
awakened to the privilege of being magnanimous and 
fair in one's dealings with the hereditary enemy, re- 
ceived her with the greatest interest and friendliness, 
and speedily fell a victim to the charm and brightness 
of the lady from France. From that time onwards it 
was amusing to hear her in her intercourse with other 
children, with whom she had hitherto been severely 
Prussian and patriotic, now urging upon them the 
necessity of admitting that French people were, one 



FREDERICK THE GREAT AND HIS FATHER 193 

must admit, often extremely charming and beautiful, 
and that the former idea that the French were with- 
out exception hateful and despicable, was one which 
personal experience showed to be somewhat warped 
from the truth. The unanimity with which they all 
agreed that " Mademoiselle " was absolutely delightful, 
and that they must confess to having met other French 
people who also conveyed a similar impression, gratified 
the little Princess extremely. 

But it was not only children who cherished past 
hatreds and memories of old, unhappy, far-off things, 
and battles long ago, but the older people too — even the 
old officers who had been through the Franco-Prussian 
War and might, one would have thought, have felt that 
they had had their legitimate revenge, were strangely 
implacable. They never seemed willing to let the 
wrongs of a past generation sleep, much less die, they 
were continually goading on the new one, keeping alight 
the ancient flame. They seemed to be annoyed that 
France had not been so crushed as they had hoped. 
The younger officers all believed in the decadence of 
France as an accomplished fact. One of them I re- 
member well who used to ride with me sometimes. 
He was attached to the Imperial stables, and being 
a great talker and very satisfied with himself and 
his own opinions, he gave me a good deal of insight 
into the thoughts and ideas of men of his own 
class. 

" France," he declared, one wet and windy day 
13 



194 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

when we were trotting round the riding-school to- 
gether, "France as a nation is finished — done with 
— going downhill every day — that is a well-known 
fact." 

I felt rather surprised, for I had recently been in 
France and seen a good many evidences of prosperity 
and industry, and as I knew he was a man who had never 
been outside Germany, I ventured to dispute what he 
said. This was some time in the year 1908 — six years 
before the Great War broke out. 

" Ah," he said, " France may appear all right on the 
surface — but she will crumble into dust before long," 
and he rubbed his fingers together as though he could 
feel France breaking up in his hand. " Her population 
grows smaller every year. How can any nation progress 
if its people are dying out ? Here in Germany the 
population increases every year — every large city has 
enormous increases — in a short time the Germans will 
be spreading everywhere and French influence will be 
shrinking." 

He went on for a long time demonstrating that 
nothing could prevent the absolute wiping out of France 
from the map of Europe, her complete extinction as a 
nation. 

" I would like," I said, when he had finished, " to 
ask you your opinion of the future of England ? " 

"Oh, England ! " he said, and turned in his saddle 
and looked back at me with something mocking and 
exultant in his tone. " There is a good deal to be said 



FREDERICK THE GREAT AND HIS FATHER 195 

about England, but I think we have talked enough 
politics for this afternoon." So we began cantering, 
and his thoughts about England remained unspoken, 
though I had no doubt in my mind that they were not 
favourable to the British Empire. 



CHAPTER XI 
BERLIN AND POTSDAM 

THE most characteristic of German towns, in 
its modernity, is Berlin, with its wide, well- 
planned streets of fine houses, and the ceaseless, 
restless rush of its citizens who lead lives of strenuous 
work and equally strenuous pleasure. Comparisons 
are proverbially odious and frequently misleading, and 
I grew tired of hearing of London and Berlin compared, 
with great detriment to the former. Berlin is a modern 
town and her suburbs have sprung up within the last 
fifty, many of them within the last twenty years, in the 
dry sandy plain which stretches across Northern Ger- 
many. Her inhabitants, being gifted with the foresight 
which is so pre-eminently typical of the German race, 
planned their city much as they are planned in Canada 
and the States. They permitted none of the acres 
of mean jerry-built streets which are such a pernicious 
blot on our English towns. This does not mean that 
there are no jerry-built houses in Berlin, they are there 
too by the thousand, but their jerryism is of a nobler, 
more daring type. The universal system of flat-living, 

in contrast to our English habit of each family demanding 

196 



BERLIN AND POTSDAM 197 

a backyard of its own, permits of the erection of palatial 
residences with wonderful cement ornamentations and 
balconies of a size sufficient to accommodate the whole 
family and the tea-table. We in England are inclined 
to sneer at what we loosely call " stucco," but it seems to 
me we have never sufficiently exploited, as have the 
Germans, the plastic building possibilities of cement, 
which lends itself so readily to the erection of solid- 
looking constructions, cool in summer and warm in 
winter, and capable of being easily and safely heated. 

Berlin, it has often been remarked, is not a city that 
grows upon one ; it has no hidden beauties, no un- 
expected nooks of quiet, old-world buildings ; all is 
blatantly, aggravatingly new and prosperous in appear- 
ance. Yet it is not without certain pleasing and even 
beautiful aspects. Its tree-planted streets, for instance, 
are charming, as is Tier-Garten — not, as I imagined 
when I heard the name for the first time, a kind of 
animal enclosure or Zoological Garden, but an extensive 
park in the very heart and centre of the city — full of 
trees, with sheets of water in it, on which the people skate 
in winter, and row up and down perspiringly in summer, 
and wide shaded paths and roads where the Emperor 
rides and walks every day when in residence at his 
capital. Through its centre runs the chief artery of 
traffic between the Brandenburger Tor and the thickly- 
populated suburb of Charlottenburg. It is the pride 
and the chief place of recreation of the Berliners. All 
the social life of the town centres round this beauty-spot, 



198 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

and the wealthiest people live in the streets which 
surround it. 

When the Court was in Berlin there were two places 
where the Emperor used to ride. One was the Tier- 
Garten, the other was the Grunewald, the forest which 
lies on the outskirts of Berlin and joins up with other 
woods which lie along the road between it and Potsdam. 
The road between the Royal Schloss and the Grunewald 
lies through a thickly-populated district, but one of the 
features of modern Berlin is the provision of excellent 
riding-roads. Down the historic Linden there is a sandy 
path on one side of the broad thoroughfare where horse- 
men can ride from the Castle to the Pariser Platz, lying 
on one side of the Brandenburger Tor, and on the other 
side are the various Reit-Wege of the Tier-Garten and 
the splendid tree-shaded triple road of the Charlotten- 
burger Chaussee, driving straight for three miles into 
the heart of the woodland. Although riding through 
Berlin was naturally rather a tedious process, owing to 
numerous intersecting side-streets of slippery asphalt, 
yet the Emperor invariably went on horseback all the 
way from his own door and back again, refusing to travel 
part of the way by automobile, as the Empress invariably 
did, her horses being sent on in charge of grooms to a 
certain spot in the forest where she arranged to join the 
Emperor. 

William always appeared in uniform when riding in 
Berlin, as did the numerous officers of his escort, who 
were never less than ten or twelve in number. I often 



BERLIN AND POTSDAM 199 

saw them pass in and out through the courtyard of the 
Schloss that lay beneath my window. They made a 
delightful break of vivid colour against the dull grey 
walls, and when they emerged into the big square — the 
Lust-Garten — outside the Schloss, there was a great 
gathering of the people from all sides, who, however, 
were not allowed to encroach upon the square until the 
Emperor and his suite had passed. It was a very 
picturesque sight. The enormous pile of the grey, dingy 
buildings of the big Palace, flanked on one side by the 
equestrian statue of the Emperor William and on the 
other by the new Cathedral of Berlin, and the spacious 
empty square across which the group of riders moved 
among the cheers and wavings of the people. The police 
were very strict in not allowing anyone to cross the 
square, and if any of the ladies of the Schloss had been 
out shopping on foot, they were not permitted to re-enter 
the Schloss unless they had been careful to take with 
them their Einlass Karte, with which every member of 
the Royal household was furnished — orange colour for 
Henschaften and blue for Dienerschaft. I always carried 
mine in my purse, for it was not the least use to reply 
to the burly Dienstmann's question, "Why do you want 
to go into the Schloss ? " " Because I live there." 

He would shake his head dubiously and after reflection 
would say roughly — all Berlin policemen of that time 
had a very disagreeable manner of addressing the public 
— " That can be, but how am I to know it ? " 

But the production of the little yellow card always 



200 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

softened the man's humour. He would bow deeply, a 
smile percolated through the grimness of his expression, 
he called me " Meine Dame " and waved his hand grace- 
fully across the square, indicating that I had his full 
permission to walk over it. 

These rides of the Emperor, two or three times a week, 
through the streets of his capital, mounted on a splendid 
horse, wearing, as he invariably did in Berlin, Hussar 
uniform, and surrounded by a glittering retinue, helped 
to impose his personality upon the people and added 
very materially to his popularity. His saddle-horses 
were all tall, big-boned animals, and they were trained 
with special care, for the Emperor, as is well known, has 
no power at all in his left arm, although he is able to hold 
the reins with his left hand. But he has a fairly good 
seat on horseback, and on those winter afternoons of 
February and early March, it was one of the sights of 
Berlin to see his progress back through the streets, 
along the broad alleys of the Tier-Garten, under the 
centre arch of the Brandenburger Tor, on each side of 
which sentries are posted, and up the Linden Avenue, 
where the windows of the big hotels were packed with 
foreigners anxious to see the Emperor, and on the pave- 
ments the people stood patiently waiting in the cold to 
see him pass by. The Master of the Horse confided 
to me his agonies of apprehension on these occasions, 
and said he had implored His Majesty to give up these 
rides over the slippery asphalt of the squares, but it was 
all in vain. The Emperor knew very well the impression 



BERLIN AND POTSDAM 201 

he made on people and believed it well worth the risk. 
It was a triumphant progress such as he enjoyed. The 
enthusiastic greetings of the people, the shrill cries of the 
school children of Berlin, who saw in the figure on the 
white horse the personification of the glory and might 
of the German Empire, were wildly enthusiastic. Even 
democratic Americans who have seen the sight have 
confessed to feeling strangely moved and stirred at it. 

" You know, I felt like cheerin' too when I saw 
William comin' along like that," said one of them to me. 
" He does understand how to keep the centre of the 
stage that man, and the sun flashin' on all those swords 
as they rode, an' the blues and reds of the uniforms ! 
I tell you he's some Kaiser, he is. He knows how to dress 
the part. He's got an instinct for the spectacular. He 
seizes the imagination. He's clever, I tell you, if he has 
done some foolish things. He plays to the gallery, and 
it's what you've got to do, I guess, nowadays if you want 
to be a power in politics." 

Berlin is a city that has grown up under the Emperor's 
hand and is stamped everywhere by his tastes. One 
feature of the new streets which might well be imitated 
in our own country is the frequency of small, open, tree- 
shaded spaces furnished with benches, where the poor 
women and children of the neighbourhood may enjoy 
the fresh air. In the more recently built quarters of 
the town, all houses, whether shops, hotels, or private 
flats, are by law obliged to have three yards of garden 
frontage, and it is surprising how even bicycles and 



202 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

ironmongery seen through a frame of climbing plants, 
roses, or clematis lose none of their attractiveness to the 
buyer. 

The Emperor's taste in sculpture is, unfortunately, 
only second rate. He is inevitably attracted in art, 
whether in painting, sculpture, or music, to the mediocre, 
so that the statues of Berlin are somewhat of a blot 
upon the town, though in the summer-time the gleam 
of their whiteness among the trees of the Sieges-Allee 
is cool and refreshing. Here are placed all the statues 
which the Emperor has presented to the town of the 
kings and electors of the Hohenzollern line. They 
are, with one or two exceptions, indifferently executed, 
and in no way to be taken as examples of the best that 
German sculptors can do. During the first few winters 
of their introduction to the capital, occasionally some 
of them when morning dawned were discovered to be 
minus noses or other necessary features, which had 
been broken off during the night. These outrages 
were always attributed by the Emperor to the Socialists, 
but a young artist of the very " modern " school once 
told me that he believed the perpetrators to be young 
art students furious at what they considered to be a 
crime against German taste. 

The Cathedral, erected on the site of the old one 
on the banks of the Spree opposite to the Royal Castle, 
is built on a plan approved by the Emperor and has 
been much criticized. The interior especially strikes 
one as bare and inartistic in the extreme, and quite 



BERLIN AND POTSDAM 203 

unworthy of a town of the size and wealth of Berlin. 
It seems to embody the spirit of Lutheranism — plain, 
unadorned, with no uplifting of the spirit to the worship 
of an ideal. 

The social life of the Berlin metropolis is not what 
one would expect in the centre of a great empire. The 
Emperor has in vain tried to give it that nameless 
something which attracts rank and fashion to such 
towns as London, Paris, and Vienna. In Berlin you 
will see neither smartly nor poorly dressed people, no 
congregating there of the wealthy aristocratic class who 
take a lead in social life and give a certain glow and 
form to existence. There is no fashionable time or 
place for people to walk or drive, and fine equipages, 
excepting those belonging to the Court, are conspicuous 
by their absence. The Emperor has from time to time 
tried in vain to create a fashionable atmosphere, and 
one season he instituted a Corso which was to emulate 
the afternoon procession of carriages in Hyde Park 
during the season ; but in spite of the fact that he himself 
daily drove in the Tier-Garten with his coach-and-four, 
and his Master of the Horse appeared with another, 
and all frequenters of Court functions were invited to 
come with their equipages, the result was a dismal 
failure. 

As one lady remarked to me, " What is the use of 
the Emperor trying to imitate London ? Your season 
is in May and June, ours is in January and February — 
no time for driving slowly up and down and chatting 



204 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

to one's friends. If we drive at all, we drive in closed 
carriages wrapped up in furs, and are thankful to get 
to our journey's end as soon as possible. Even if the 
weather happens to be fine and bright there is no attrac- 
tion in the Tier-Garten at this time of year, no flowers, 
no leaves on the trees." 

So the Emperor had reluctantly to renounce his 
attempt to make a fashionable promenade hour in an 
unsuitable season. 

When he held a Levee — a Cercle, as it is called in 
Berlin — taking place at 9.30 p.m., I would watch the 
carriages as they came into the courtyard, and slowly 
ranged themselves row on row to wait for the return 
of the officers, and never did I in those first early years 
of my residence at Court behold such a collection of 
wretched equipages. Every last decrepit vehicle which 
would hold together, every poor, trembling, worn-out 
horse — the horses of Berlin were a crying scandal and 
shame to any decent community before the advent of 
the automobile drove them off the street — was pressed 
into service, and it was strange to see tall handsome 
men in brilliant uniforms descending from carriages of 
the last degree of shabbiness, with drivers who appeared 
to have made no effort, by a little personal attention to 
their own toilette or that of the horses, to minimize 
the depressing effect of their appearance within the 
precincts of the Royal Castle. Sometimes from the 
upper landing of the big staircase leading to the " White 
Hall " I would watch the crowd of officers in full-dress 



BERLIN AND POTSDAM 205 

uniform, conspicuous among them the Cuirassiers of 
the Guard in their white tunics, wearing high top-boots, 
mingled with and reflecting in their burnished cuirasses 
the many-coloured greys, blues, reds, and greens of the 
surrounding uniforms, infantry and cavalry, which 
surged up the wide marble staircase. There was an 
incessant clanking of swords and the queer murmur 
of blended talk which sounds so strangely when one 
is above a crowd and can hear no distinct word. It 
is a noise much more like what we are apt to call the 
meaningless gabble and chatter of birds and animals than 
is at all complimentary to our sense of human superiority. 

If, after watching the stream of courtiers pass, one 
stepped to the windows on the opposite side of the 
corridor and looked out through the dark and dismal 
night into the dimly-lighted courtyard — for the excellent 
electric illumination of the Berlin streets had not pene- 
trated to the Castle yard, which was appallingly ill-lit — 
one could not but be painfully struck by the contrast 
of row upon row of broken-down animals and men, with 
their wretched vehicles, all waiting in the bitter sleet. 
Cabmen's shelters have never been introduced into 
Berlin, and although there existed a Tier-Schutz-V erein, 
equivalent to our English " Society for the Prevention 
of Cruelty to Animals," its activities never seemed to be 
very pronounced. 

Mr. Richard Thirsk, writing in 1911 his impressions 
of the population of the rapidly-growing capital of 
Germany, says of it ; 



206 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

" The majority of the street crowds are peasants who 
have left the fields and ploughs for the more exhilarating 
excitements of Berlin, bringing with them to the capital 
their country manners. They have not yet had time to 
erect any standard of behaviour." 

And it is true that in Berlin more than in any other 
large German town with which I am acquainted there is 
a conspicuous lack of that polish and courtesy which is 
popularly supposed to be acquired where people con- 
gregate in large numbers. The shop assistants were 
distinctly rude in their manners, and it often amused me 
to note the rapid change from boorishness to servility 
of the young man or woman behind the counter when 
they suddenly became aware that a Court carriage was 
waiting outside for me. 

The only smart equipages to be seen in the streets 
were those from the Royal stables, and every official 
connected with the Court was allowed the privilege, with 
certain restrictions, of a carriage and pair for the use of 
himself and his wife. But the German aristocracy who 
came to stay in Berlin never brought their own carriages 
with them, but used the ordinary cabs, such as they were. 

The Crown Prince, after his marriage, when he had a 
fairly large establishment of his own, made a practice of 
driving about a good deal in his dogcart drawn by four 
fine brown horses — occasionally he drove a team of 
seven together — much to the delight of the idlers in 
Unter den Linden. 

But in spite of all the Emperor could do, in spite of 



BERLIN AND POTSDAM 207 

the stir and excitement that agitated the town whenever 
he was in residence, Berlin always appeared to me a 
somewhat sordid, dull, and arid place, where existence 
consisted of a feverish and crowded chase after rather 
dubious forms of enjoyment. Outside the University 
there seemed to exist no intellectual circle. People had 
fashionable crazes for art or for literature. If the Em- 
peror went three times to the exhibition of Old English 
Masters, all Berlin flocked to see them. The critics, 
austerely aloof, as they invariably were in their attitude 
towards any branch of art which received Royal approval, 
would write severely cutting notices of the " prettiness " 
of Gainsborough and Reynolds, and the evil effect the 
exhibition of their pictures — which might be good enough 
for the poor ignorant English — would have upon the 
taste of the Berlin public, so easily guided into wrong 
channels ; but there was no body of artists sufficiently 
strong to overcome the influence of the Emperor's 
liking and patronage of the mediocre. It was to Munich 
that young men of power and originality flocked if they 
desired that appreciation and understanding which is 
the chief stimulus of genius. 

" The Emperor," said an artist to me once, " knows 
and cares nothing for art. He only likes men who can 
paint bad historical or military pictures, or portrait 
painters to whom he can sit for posterity. He could not 
recognize genius if it came and took him by the hand. 
He would turn his back on it and run after something 
clever and commonplace." 



208 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

He groaned and shook his head as he spoke, and I 
tried to comfort him by telling him that in London too 
we had quantities of inartistic masterpieces dotting the 
streets, and that there was a time when we worshipped 
Landseer and 

" Ah," he groaned, " your city makes no pretence at 
being beautiful, but ours is a hollow sham. I go about 
dreaming of what it might have been, and what it is." 

I felt glad that I was not burdened with the artistic 
temperament to such an acute degree. 

But if Berlin bears written largely all over it the 
impress of the Emperor's influence and personality, it 
is strange that Potsdam, that quaint old town which is 
to the German capital as Windsor is to London, has been 
left practically untouched by him, much to its advan- 
tage. The Emperor's palace — the New Palace, as it is 
called, though built by Frederick the Great — lies about 
one mile from Potsdam near the large Wildpark or 
deer-forest, a lovely wilderness of trees where deer roam 
in large herds and down whose broad avenues of beech 
and oak the Emperor's daughter rode or drove nearly 
every day. The Palace is divided from the town of Pots- 
dam by the large park and gardens of Sans Souci, the 
tiny little palace dedicated to the memory of Frederick, 
who occupied it in preference to the big building near 
by. It is the spirit of this king, the spirit of the 
past, which characterizes the town of Potsdam and 
stamps it with a charm of its own. It possesses a 
reserve and a consciousness of bygone glories which 



BERLIN AND POTSDAM 209 

give it an atmosphere of calm dignity not to be found in 
the newness and blatant prosperity of Berlin. 

I remember one of my earliest impressions of Pots- 
dam was the sight of a street in the very heart of the 
town, bordered on each side with acacia trees for part 
of its length, and red hawthorn towards the end. The 
acacia trees with their vivid green foliage were in full 
bloom, their creamy white flowers hanging in pendent 
clusters while their delicious scent filled the air, effectu- 
ally drowning the usual odours of leather, pickled 
cabbage, and Swiss cheese which hang about most 
German streets. The deep red of the hawthorn beyond 
made a beautiful background to the white acacia. For 
several years, at the season of acacia bloom, I passed 
often up and down the street so as to enjoy the beautiful 
sight and scent. Then there came a time when, on 
my first visit of the year to Potsdam after the return 
of the Court from Berlin, I turned the well-known 
corner and found that all the beauty had vanished. 
They were laying tram lines down the road, and the 
trees had been cut down. 

Some of the Potsdam streets are intersected by 
narrow canals, chiefly, I suppose, for the purposes of 
drainage, as nothing in the shape of water-craft is ever 
seen upon them. Swans glided up and down, and 
were fed with bread by the idle passer-by, and on Satur- 
days a fish-market was held all along the edge, where 
the fish-women sat in big tubs with charcoal braziers in 
the bottom to keep their feet warm. In other side- 
14 



210 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

streets a kind of open market was held, and it appeared 
to me, in view of the bitter weather experienced in the 
winter-time, that a covered market was one of Potsdam's 
most urgent necessities. 

But the very cobble-stones of Potsdam breathed of 
past ages. They were the most painful material to walk 
upon, and had in the principal thoroughfares been re- 
placed by cement ; but in the quiet side-streets, with 
their funny short flights of stone steps, their mansard 
roofs and somewhat dilapidated stucco Cupids and 
wreaths of flowers of that Rococo — a variety of the style 
of Louis Quatorze and Louis Quinze — so much beloved 
of the old Prussian king, one trod literally the same 
stones that have been pressed by the feet of Frederick's 
field-marshals, of the Scotch brothers Keith, of Seydlitz 
and Zieten. One could imagine the small dried-up 
figure of Voltaire, the sometime bosom friend and after- 
wards most waspish enemy of His Prussian Majesty, 
strolling down the green alleys in his full-bottomed wig 
and long-skirted coat, chattering volubly in French to 
Frederick, who, to the regret of modern Prussians, never 
willingly spoke any other language and detested the 
German speech, which to him sounded barbarous and 
only fit for peasants. 

Potsdam has always been a considerable military 
centre, the home of the Life Guards and of the infantry 
regiments in which the sons of the Kaiser received their 
first early initiation into military duties. Huge square 
barracks are built everywhere, often on very ill-chosen 



BERLIN AND POTSDAM 211 

sites, where they block out and spoil much of the 
scenery. 

All through the day military forage- wagons roll through 
the town, piled up with hay or straw, and other carts 
loaded with Commis-brod, the loaves of soldier's bread, 
of a peculiar greyish brown texture rather indigestible 
to ordinary capacities but decidedly satisfying in 
quality. Bread and cheese and soup, with a little coffee, 
is the German soldier's chief stand-by. He is not 
pampered in times of peace. 

The Crown Prince has a winter residence in the town 
of Potsdam itself in the old Stadt-Schloss, as it is called, 
where he has a suite of apartments, while his chief 
summer residence is in the outskirts of the town, in the 
Marble Palace, lent to him by his father the Emperor. 
The Marble Palace is charmingly situated on the 
Heiligen See, or Holy Lake, one of the numerous small 
lakes of the Havel, but it has the disadvantage of many 
royal palaces, it is very open to the public. The Crown 
Prince and Princess dislike also to have to live in old- 
fashioned rooms around which cling so many of those 
memories of the past that they have become holy relics 
and may not be modernized without risk of an outcry 
against the desecration of doing away with a former 
king's wall-papers. For this reason they were in the 
earlier years of their married life anxious to build a 
home of their own, as most of their predecessors had 
done, and a site in the neighbouring park of Babelsberg, 
in which stands the queer castellated Schloss of the Old 



212 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

Emperor William, mentioned in Queen Victoria's diary, 
was selected and prepared, some thousands of pounds 
being spent on levelling and preparing it. But for some 
years before the war broke out it was not proceeded 
with, much to the Crown Prince's discontentment. 
Perhaps the Emperor reflected that the already existing 
quantity of unoccupied Royal castles needed no addition 
to their number, or the necessary money could not be 
found ; but the young couple still have to content them- 
selves with their Marble Palace, with its somewhat 
comfortless arrangements and conspicuous lack of bath- 
rooms and modern conveniences. 

" The only thing it's good for is boating or swimming," 
I once heard the Crown Prince impatiently remark. 
" You can step out of your drawing-room window into 
the water if you like ; but if you do, you'll have to take 
a bath immediately after to wash away the Potsdam 
sewage, a good deal of which is discharged into the lake." 

And it had to be admitted that much of the former 
charm of the Marble Palace had been spoiled by the 
encroaching villadom of Potsdam and by the erection 
of barracks " directly opposite the drawing - room 
windows," as the Empress indignantly remarked. 

Scattered in the outskirts of the town were several 
houses belonging to the Crown in which the various 
morganatic wives or mistresses of dead-and-gone 
Prussian kings had been formerly installed, among 
them Villa Ingenheim and Villa Liegnitz, the last one 
having been given to the morganatic spouse of Frederick 



BERLIN AND POTSDAM 213 

William the Third, who at the age of fifty-four, fourteen 
years after the death of the admired and unfortunate 
Queen Louise, married again. His second wife received 
the title Princess of Liegnitz, and lived here until her 
death. She was only twenty-four at the time of her 
marriage. 

When the Duchess of Albany and her daughter, now 
Princess Alexander of Teck, lived in Potsdam for a few 
months, while the Duke of Saxe-Coburg, the son of the 
Duchess, was undergoing his military training, the 
Emperor lent them the Villa Ingenheim, which is very 
pleasantly situated, the waters of the Havel skirting one 
side of the garden. It was formerly the house, given 
to her by the King, of the Countess von Ingenheim — 
Julie von Voss, married during the life of his legal wife, 
Princess Louise of Hesse-Darmstadt, and with her 
consent, to Frederick William II of Prussia. She lived 
only two years, and was followed by a second "left- 
handed" wife, also married, like the first, with full 
ecclesiastical ceremony to the King. When the Duchess 
quitted the villa, it remained empty for a few years 
until the marriage of Prince Fritz, the second son of 
the Kaiser, to Princess Sophie Charlotte of Oldenburg, 
a niece of the Duchess of Connaught, when it underwent 
drastic renovations and was given as a home to the 
young couple. Large stables were built, and the house 
itself converted from its former modest proportions 
into an imposing and comfortable building. Princess 
Fritz, who was an enthusiastic gardener, a taste which is 



214 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

considered rather peculiar in the Prussian Royal Family, 
converted the grounds from a wilderness of straggling 
shrubs and arid gravel spaces into a beautiful rose- 
embowered paradise, and there used to be a great deal 
of covert grumbling at Court because the young couple, 
who had no children, preferred to spend their time in 
superintending the planting of rhododendron bushes 
rather than in opening bazaars and performing other 
public duties. Princess Fritz was, as a matter of fact, 
much too delicate to undertake a great deal in the way 
of public work. 

I once was sent by the Empress to a charity " five 
o'clock " given at the Hotel Adlon, which was to be 
presided over by Prince and Princess Fritz, who had been 
reluctantly persuaded — it may be commanded — to lend 
the countenance of their presence to the affair. As I 
went into the "Adlon," the largest, most fashionable, 
and most expensive of Berlin hotels, situated on Unter 
den Linden at the corner of the Pariser Platz and looking 
on to the Brandenburger Tor, I found at the entrance the 
usual reception committee, consisting of several very 
fashionably-dressed ladies, one with a very expensive- 
looking bouquet obviously intended for Royalty, and 
two or three gentlemen in faultless morning attire, wearing 
frock-coats and with shiny top-hats on their heads. A 
liveried porter was keeping a sharp look-out, and in 
the big lounge of the hotel a discreet crowd of other 
expensive-looking people were ranged, all with necks 
craned towards the door. 




PRINCE EITEL FRIEDRICH ("PRINCE FRITZ"), SECOND SON OF 
THE GERMAN EMPEROR 



BERLIN AND POTSDAM 215 

I went on upstairs with the lady from the Schloss 
who was my companion, into the tea-room, where little 
tables were arranged ; and while we were consuming our 
five-mark tea, we became suddenly aware of Prince and 
Princess Fritz standing in the middle of the big room 
among the tables looking rather frightened and lost. 
In a few minutes the isolated members of a very agitated 
reception committee, which had quite lost its cohesion, 
hurried past in a straggling line, consternation written 
large on the features of every individual, and the lady 
in charge of the bouquet constantly embarrassed through 
the broad ribbon streamers which tied it catching in 
people's chairs. 

The Prince and Princess had driven up in their 
automobile to the side entrance of the hotel, whether 
from accident or design it is difficult to say, but they made 
no pretence of being pleased to be there, and after the 
Princess had accepted the bouquet and made a few 
nervous remarks, they went away again, evidently glad 
to escape. 

The Villa Liegnitz, built close to the gates of 
Sans Souci, was given to the Kaiser's fourth son, Prince 
August Wilhelm, " Au-Wi," as he is called by his family, 
when he married his cousin. The Prince in question 
has very artistic tastes, which are shared by his wife, 
a Princess of Schleswig-Holstein, who is a very good 
amateur artist. When the Villa was to be re-decorated, 
the young Prince insisted on choosing all the papers 
and furniture himself. I once drove with the Princess 



216 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

Victoria Louise, his sister, to the Villa, and the Prince, 
who was there with his wife, — they were living in Berlin 
till their new home could be ready for them, — invited 
us to come and look at the hangings he was choosing, 
so we went in, and found there the adjutant of the 
Prince — his military gentleman-in-waiting, who with 
pocket-book in hand and a very anxious expression of 
face, was waiting to receive the Prince's commands. 
I pitied the unfortunate gentleman from the bottom of 
my heart. He was obviously outraged at having to 
bend his mind — which was purely military and had no 
leanings whatever in the direction of applied art — to 
the question of whether rose-coloured or yellow curtains 
would be better with certain wall-papers. Frequently 
invited by the polite Prince to give his opinion, he 
emphatically washed his hands of any responsibility 
while making hurried notes of colour and quantities in 
his pocket-book — notes which, when the princely mind 
reconsidered things, had invariably to be changed, not 
once, but many times. We left the three of them, 
the Prince and his wife still discussing artistic possi- 
bilities, the adjutant still writing feverishly, and as we 
drove away towards Sans Souci, the young Princess 
with a bewildered look sighed heavily. 

" Poor Herr von Roder ! " she said pityingly, " I do 
feel sorry for him. I'm sure he's got everything muddled 
up. Could you understand what they wanted ? I 
couldn't. I expect he'll have got his blues and greens 
all in the wrong places." 



BERLIN AND POTSDAM 217 

There were one or two other empty villas, to which 
the Princess would occasionally drive, stroll round the 
deserted gardens a-while, and then return. The one 
with the prettiest garden was the Villa Alexander, 
once inhabited by a mysterious " uncle " of the Princess, 
one of those uncles of royalties whose relationship is 
rather puzzling, especially if one is not conversant with 
the morganatic family complications. For a long time I 
was perplexed by the allusions of the Princess to " my 
cousin von Esmarch " until I discovered that he was 
the son of an aunt of the Empress who had married a 
doctor. 

The Villa Alexander was a mouldy, decaying kind 
of house, standing in a lovely position high above the 
lake. All the plaster was falling from the walls, there 
were damp stains and splotches on the faded old-fashioned 
paper that yet clung precariously ; leaves drifted into 
the hall and remained unswept. It had the neglected 
uncared-for look of places which no longer have human 
ties. 

A much more delightful place was Lindstedt, built 
in the corner of a field, close to the New Palace. It 
was, like most of the other villas, in quasi-Italian style, 
and had been erected by Frederick William IV, a cosy, 
intimate little house, which he evidently much preferred 
to the big Palace a few hundred yards away. It still 
possessed a certain amount of furniture and was in 
excellent condition, having been kept well warmed 
and aired. For a short time Prince Joachim had been 



218 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

installed there with his governor before being sent to 
Plon, and once for six weeks the little Princess lived 
in it while her mother was away in Sicily. 

It was a time on which she looked back with joy. 
The pleasure of being able to have a ploughed field 
almost in front of her window, and to watch the young 
coveys of partridges running in and out of the growing 
corn, was something entirely new in her experience. 
The small salons, with their beautifully-polished parquet 
floors, opened into each other, with that curious lack 
of privacy characteristic of houses on the Continent, 
and as usual there was a complete lack of communicating 
passages. But the house was bright and sunny, and 
embowered in roses, and if the sentries posted at the 
foot of the garden steps — stolid young soldiers who were 
not much protection — were found to be horribly in the 
way when the Princess wanted to race about and enjoy 
herself, they were the only drawback to an otherwise 
charming existence. 

" I like a villa much better than a palace," the 
Princess remarked once, " they are so much more 
homely, and they have no state-rooms in them. State- 
rooms are cold and gloomy and no one is ever happy 
in them." 



CHAPTER XII 
GARDENS AND ZEPPELINS 

IN view of the avowed love of Nature and outdoor 
life among the people, I often wondered, when in 

Germany, at the conspicuous lack of beautiful 
private gardens to be found in nearly all parts of the 
Fatherland. Public gardens were as a rule cultivated 
with knowledge and intelligence, but those belonging to 
the houses of the country gentry showed none of the 
loving care and taste which in England we so frequently 
find lavished on a small garden by people of compara- 
tively slender means. 

Once, when the Empress was travelling with her 
daughter from Rominten to Berlin, she broke her 
journey on the way, to go and take luncheon with a 
very wealthy nobleman whose house and estates lay not 
far from Danzig. The suite travelling with her were 
naturally included in the party, and I was struck, as we 
drove up to the house, along a country lane bordered 
by ploughed fields, through cheering groups of villagers, 
at the extraordinary badness of the road along which 
the smart carriages were bumping, and also at the very 

poor and insignificant entrance to the large solidly- 

219 



220 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

built Schloss, which had a good deal of architectural 
pretension, and covered a fair amount of ground. I 
was continually being assured in Germany, by those 
natives of the country who had visited England, that the 
lack of beautiful old country-houses was entirely owing 
to the Napoleonic invasion ; that all the old houses 
had been gutted and destroyed, together with their 
valuable contents. This was no doubt to a great extent 
true, but it hardly altogether excused, I thought, the 
modern neglect. In Berlin, for example, one noted how 
ingenious and often successful people were in adding 
beautiful details to the outsides of their residences, but in 
the country, where many of the German aristocracy 
live nearly the whole year round on their estates, there 
was an obvious lack of interest in the gardens, the grass 
grew long, the walks were untidy, the bushes unpruned 
and straggling. 

Here in this big country place, where one might have 
thought that the visit of the Empress would have stimu- 
lated everybody to do their best to improve the appear- 
ance of the grounds, which were full of beautiful possi- 
bilities, stretching away towards lovely glades of 
woodland and meadow, the grass on the lawn in front 
of the fine peristyle that was in the centre of the house 
had not been cut. It was, it is true, full of wild flowers, 
buttercups and cuckoo-flowers and white marguerites, 
but I suspect there was no aesthetic reason for leaving 
them there. They would be made into hay a little 
later on, for the frugal German mind refuses to waste 



GARDENS AND ZEPPELINS 221 

anything. Winding walks through the woodland led 
towards the Aus-sichts-Punkt, the " view " which is so 
carefully noted and cherished by all good Germans. 
But it was a tangled wilderness, when it might, by the 
exercise of a little of that love and care to which gardens 
respond so readily, have been a beautiful setting to the 
old house and to the troop of conspicuously lovely 
children belonging to our host and hostess, who were 
people of great taste in certain directions, having 
travelled widely and accumulated many treasures of art. 
This did not, however, prevent their house from being in 
its interior arrangements rather ugly and uncomfortable. 
They had not been able to get away from the chocolate 
walls so beloved in Germany. The big hall, with a 
curving staircase at one side which, if it had been in an 
English house, would have been converted into a charming 
lounge with Persian rugs on the floor, with tables and 
cosy chairs, plants and newspapers abounding on every 
side, was a terribly bare place, the boards painted 
chocolate colour and no furniture in it excepting an iron 
stove and the usual arrangements for hats and coats. 
There was no sense of home in it. It repelled one 
instead of being inviting and alluring. Yet the luncheon 
was served on costly china, our bouillon was drunk 
from bowls of egg-shell porcelain, each unique of its 
kind, brought by our host from Japan, and our dessert 
knives were works of art in jade and mother-of-pearl. 
In the children's nurseries hung original paintings by 
Richter, the child's artist par excellence of Germany. 



222 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

" I like them to grow up with such things," said their 
father to the Empress; "it forms their taste uncon- 
sciously." 

The Empress agreed, though she afterwards said that 
she thought that good reproductions would have been 
just as effectual. 

The only really cheerful, modern-looking, but tasteful 
and pretty room in the house was the nursery of the 
younger children, one of whom, a tiny baby, was there 
in the arms of the nurse, a stout-looking peasant woman, 
who, sitting beside the tiled English fire-place surrounded 
by white enamelled furniture, managed to look con- 
spicuously out of place. 

It was altogether rather a bewildering visit. The 
courteous, cultured host and hostess, the latter in a 
wonderful gown from Vienna ; the beautiful rosy children 
with their suite of schoolrooms and nurseries ; the 
evidences of wealth and the desire for beauty and 
artistic surroundings, together with the lack of know- 
ledge how to attain it fully ; for the setting of all 
the beautiful things the Count had collected, of his 
lovely wife and children, was hopeless — nobody and 
nothing can look well against a painted chocolate 
background even when green plush curtains are added. 

These curious inconsistencies, or what appeared so 
to me, were always cropping up and meeting one in 
Germany. Naturally we have them in England too, but 
they manifest themselves in different ways. In Germany 
everybody believes in the cult of the " Beautiful " and 



GARDENS AND ZEPPELINS 223 

strains after it, often laboriously destroying, or at 
least neglecting, what lies close at hand, to spend much 
money and labour on less beautiful things. 

I remember another garden, one where I spent many 
happy hours with the charming people who owned it. 
It was separated from a lake only by a low balustrade, 
and the children of the family, as the father, a son of the 
celebrated Dubois-Reymond, once said to me, " have to 
become amphibious at an early age or else die of drown- 
ing." So the boys and girls became amphibious, and 
possessed and knew how to manage every kind of light 
water-craft that is known upon the lakes. Their 
garden was small, but even in its neglected condition 
beautiful. A rose grew over the balustrade and gazed 
at its own loveliness in the water, a rose which struggled 
against neglect, against non-pruning, against unsuitable 
and water-logged soil. It did its best, but with a little 
help it might have done so much better ; and as for the 
two or three standards in the centre bed, waving loose 
from their stakes in the breeze that swept over the lakes, 
they stretched out despairing arms begging for a support 
which was denied them. On the kitchen side of the 
house was a Laube, a slight erection of poles, over which 
in summer the wild vine — the " gadding vine," as Milton 
calls it — spread a thick green canopy through which 
the sunlight filtered in a lush golden-green. Here the 
maids sat to drink their afternoon coffee, to eat what 
old-fashioned Germans still call their Vesper-brod, and 
to enjoy, if the mosquitoes for which Potsdam is famous 



224 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

would permit, the evening air. All those gardens of the 
villas along the lake-side were much the same. There 
was always the Laube, a few neglected roses, and the 
scraggly, untrimmed grass. No one ever considered 
the garden, or if they did, were ever conscious of 
any possibilities of improvement in it. Probably all 
German gardeners have the same standard of achieve- 
ment. They seem to walk about a good deal in wooden 
shoes wearing a blue apron, they are continually raking 
the sandy paths, they clear up the dead leaves in 
autumn, they mow the grass with a scythe when they 
consider it has grown a sufficient length, — perhaps two 
or three times a year, — and they cannot imagine that 
people want anything more, and as a rule they don't. 
Some wildly enterprising garden-lovers, however, will 
purchase one or two of thjse ugly little china gnomes, 
grinning cheerfully from under their scarlet jelly-bag 
caps at the passer-by, and deposit them, one in a sitting, 
the other in a standing position, in the centre of their 
garden surrounded by painfully-arranged rock-work and 
a few rather smoky-looking shrubs. 

The gay cottage gardens which we know in England 
are never seen in Germany, not even in the neighbour- 
hood of the Emperor's palaces. One reason for this 
may be the national custom of employing women in the 
country districts to do the field work, so that they 
naturally have little time or inclination for the cultiva- 
tion of flowers ; and though great and not unsuccessful 
efforts have been made to encourage the Berlin work- 



GARDENS AND ZEPPELINS 225 

man to take an interest in gardening, the allotment 
grounds which I used to pass when going on the railway 
from Potsdam to Berlin were entirely devoted to vege- 
tables, with perhaps a Laube overrun with a creeper 
erected in one corner. But the workman who cultivates 
and exhibits roses or chrysanthemums with the success 
that is done in England has not yet been evolved in 
modern Germany. 

I have a very vivid recollection of an exhibition of 
flowers in Berlin which I once saw when in attendance 
on the young Princess, who visited it in company with 
the Emperor and Empress. As a display of flowers, it 
could not be said to enter into competition either in the 
way of tasteful arrangement or high-class quality of 
material with our English exhibitions. What to me 
was a very painful incident characterized the very 
beginning of -he Royal tour of inspection. 

The Princess had arrived in a carriage before her 
parents, and while waiting for their coming, walked 
into the part of the exhibition near to the entrance, 
where she saw the wall before her covered with an 
enormous canvas on which was painted, in distemper, 
what purported to be a portion of the gardens of the 
" Achilleion," the Emperor's palace at Corfu, of which 
a corner had been included in the picture. There were 
marble steps in the foreground leading the spectator 
by imperceptible degrees into a bed of real tulips of very 
beautiful colours, which were arranged in front of this 
artistic atrocity, copied from a picture-post-card and 
15 



226 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

the work of a young gardener, who in frock-coat and 
white kid gloves stood in front of his masterpiece, 
looking rather nervous, but obviously prepared for 
congratulations and thanks on the part of Royalty. The 
Princess, then a girl of fourteen, admired the canvas 
and told the artist that it was sehr nett, — very nice, — 
though, as she whispered to me, the sea in the picture 
was not a bit like the real sea in Corfu. 

When the Emperor and Empress arrived together 
a few minutes afterwards, they, with their daughter 
and the large suite in attendance, were conducted 
through the smiling, bowing crowd at the entrance, and 
immediately halted in front of the dreadful canvas. 
The complacent secretary of the exhibition introduced 
it and its author, who stood beside it in a radiance of 
glory, while the surrounding fashionable crowd looked 
smilingly on. 

The Emperor stared across the tulips at the canvas, 
while the Empress murmured a kindly, though dubious, 
"sehr nett," and the ladies and gentlemen of the suite 
also concentrated their eyeglasses upon the picture. 
The young gardener, standing beside it, was obviously 
uplifted to the highest pinnacle of bliss. He was not 
left there long, however. 

It was certainly a crude and inartistic performance, 
but I was surprised at the anger displayed by the 
Emperor. He was obviously extraordinarily sensitive 
with regard to his palace in Corfu and the impression 
which it conveyed to the public. Yet one would think 




PRINCE AUGUSTUS WILLIAM OF PRUSSIA, FOURTH SON OF THE 
GERMAN EMPEROR 



GARDENS AND ZEPPELINS 227 

that he must have grown somewhat callous and indifferent 
towards loyal attempts to perpetuate himself, his wife 
and family, and his dwelling-places, in well-meant but 
hopelessly ignorant ways. It is one of the penalties 
that so obviously attach to any public position. But 
he stood before the canvas in a dead silence, his face 
growing sterner and darker, and a kind of shiver of 
apprehension fell on the smiling crowd, and the young 
gardener seemed to wilt and shrink together and his 
face grew white. 

I had never seen William with such an angry look in 
his eyes, such palpably furious contempt in his look. 
The secretary, smitten with dismay, was murmuring 
phrases which broke off suddenly in the middle, and 
the Emperor kept on staring at the picture. It never 
seemed to occur to him that this was the naive, well- 
meaning, and loyally-intended work of an artistically 
uneducated man, and that in any case it was not meant 
to be looked at nearly, but its effect judged from a 
distance ; or that the crushed individual who was 
responsible for it would suffer miserably at the thought 
of the time and labour he had expended, only to achieve 
a ghastly public failure. 

But the Emperor was absorbed in furious contempla- 
tion, and saw in the picture merely a caricature of his 
well-beloved " Achilleion." At last, breaking the un- 
comfortable silence, he thrust his head forward and 
barked out a few angry sentences. 

" That" and he nodded at the picture, quite ignoring 



228 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

the beautiful tulips surrounding it, " that is supposed 
to be my garden in Corfu. It's not a bit like it " (I am 
sure no one, even those who had not been there, had 
thought that it could be, excepting in the limited picture- 
post-card sense), "not the least like it " — his voice rising in 
angry crescendo. " It's horrible, horrible ! " He hissed 
the word " grdsslich " between his teeth, and flung himself 
round so suddenly that it was with difficulty that his 
suite could move away quickly enough to let him pass 
on into the interior of the exhibition. It was surprising 
that in such a public manner, before so many witnesses, 
the Emperor should have given way to the feelings 
stirred in him by the unfortunate gardener's efforts, 
for as a rule he always seemed conciliatory and affable 
to the public. 

He cares little for his own gardens beyond insisting 
that they shall supply him constantly with fresh vege- 
tables both in and out of season, and the Empress herself, 
though fond of flowers, takes no immediate interest in 
the arrangement of the grounds, which might be vastly 
improved by judicious planting, but are at present 
commonplace and characterless, with the exception of 
those in Wilhelmshohe ; but even here, with the splendid 
background of the hills behind, the attempt to improve 
on Nature has chiefly taken the form of making artificial 
cascades and waterworks. They are due to a former 
Elector of Cassel, who in those days suffered from no 
labour troubles, using his people's muscles to move the 
enormous blocks of stone he needed for his cascades, 



GARDENS AND ZEPPELINS 229 

and sometimes selling his subjects like cattle to his 
cousin of Hanover and England, who sent them by ship- 
loads to fight for him in America. 

This castle of Wilhelmshohe, situated in the midst of 
beautiful scenery, with the town of Cassel lying in a 
hollow of the hills beneath it, is, in its interior arrange- 
ments and decoration, the most delightful of all the huge 
palaces belonging to the Emperor, possessing as it does 
an air of gaiety and lightness which is to be found in no 
other of the Imperial houses, built, as are most of them, 
round an arid courtyard of gravel or sand. But every 
room in Wilhelmshohe, erected by an Elector William 
of Hesse-Cassel, looks towards the hills on one side or 
the other. On the one lies the red-roofed town, and 
beyond it are to be seen the blue lines of melting peaks 
far away on the horizon, on the other the nearer slopes 
of the Taunus range rise up from the garden in pleasantly- 
wooded inclines, intersected by broad winding carriage 
and foot ways. 

The furniture of the Castle is of the early Empire 
style and was probably placed in it at the time when 
it was occupied by that brother of Napoleon, Jerome, 
King of Westphalia, who married an American lady, 
Miss Paterson, whom he was forced to divorce and to take 
as a wife more fitting to his rank a daughter of the King 
of Wurtemberg, who became devotedly attached to 
him, refusing to desert her husband when he was driven 
from his throne. 

Together with the Empire furniture were a good many 



230 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

other objects, clocks and vases of an earlier period, 
always a subject of dispute to the ladies and gentlemen 
of the suite during their yearly stay of a month in the 
Castle, as to whether they belonged to the Louis Quinze 
or Louis Seize period. We were divided into two camps, 
each holding tenaciously to its own views. The general 
paucity of subjects for conversation naturally made 
any point in dispute much too valuable to be easily 
abandoned, and one of the adjutants used to amuse 
himself every year on his first appearance in the salon 
where we all assembled before and after dinner by 
throwing this apple of discord into the middle of the 
company. 

" How beautiful that clock is ! Louis Quinze, isn't 
it ? " he would say. 

" No ; Louis Seize," would reply firmly one lady, 
darting looks of defiance at somebody near who she 
knew held a different opinion. 

Then he would press for information as to the dis- 
tinctive characteristics of the two periods, which nobody, 
however tenacious in support of her own views, was 
able to supply, excepting in a vaguely indecisive manner 
— generally, however, quoting some great authority such 
as Dr. Bode, or the Director of the Hohenzollern Museum. 
Sometimes he would suggest that the clock might be 
a connecting-link possessing some of the features of 
both periods, but this adjustment was always energeti- 
cally rejected by both parties, and the proper classifica- 
tion of the timepiece, which was a very beautiful and 



GARDENS AND ZEPPELINS 231 

costly piece of work, still remains somewhat doubtful in 
my mind. 

If the German has not yet acquired a taste for 
gardening, he at any rate never neglects, as we are apt 
to do in England, the abounding beauties provided by 
nature. Every little out-of-the-way country Wirts- 
haus is keen to draw to itself customers by advertising 
on its walls the Schoner Aus-sichts-punkt that may be 
seen at a little distance, and the Verschonerungs- 
Verein — the " Association of Beautification " — places 
benches at all points where the traveller, in the opinion 
of the Verein, ought to stop and admire. 

There was a tiny village a few miles outside Potsdam, 
the merest little sketch of a place, with no very palpable 
attractions, but it possessed one natural feature, — rather 
rare in this flat landscape of the Mark Brandenburg, — 
a hill or hillock it may be called, of such a nature that 
its grassy slopes provided a natural toboggan slide, or 
Rutsch-Bahn as they are called in Germany. Enterprising 
youngsters first discovered its possibilities and with 
pieces of board joyously cascaded down its slopes on 
Sundays, but the proprietor of the small inn suddenly 
one day glimpsed his opportunities and had the magic 
word Rutsch-Bahn painted on his house front, while at 
the same time he ordered some short lengths of board 
from the village carpenter. Since then he has flourished 
exceedingly. The Rutsch-Bahn being quiet and secluded, 
people took their children out there for an afternoon's 
fun. Staid professors and their stout motherly wives 



232 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

have been seen " rutsching " gravely, with sober but 
none the less intense enjoyment down the slope. After 
climbing the hill with their boards several times in the 
heat of the afternoon they are glad to go to the inn 
and drink copiously of coffee under the shade of mine 
host's cherry-trees. 

The Germans, as we knew them before the war, 
were remarkable for their love of small domestic cere- 
monies. Birthdays, for example, which we in England 
keep in a perfunctory way with casual congratulations, 
sometimes omitted, and in the case of children with 
presents, are in the best-regulated German households 
days of agitation and preparation for the whole family. 
There will probably be an early morning song, performed 
outside the victim's door, and his plate at the breakfast- 
table will have a flower-wreath round it which will be 
terribly in the way but must on no account be disturbed. 

A birthday cake will occupy the middle of the table, 
bearing with implacable attention to detail and accuracy 
the number of candles equal to the victim's age. 

" Aunt Lotta is thirty-five to-day ; I think it's 
quite time she was married," suddenly remarked one 
small boy in a pause in the conversation at a birthday 
party, and Aunt Lotta, whose opinion coincided with 
that of her nephew, resolved to spend her birthday 
away from home in future. 

At the Prussian Court, as long as the young Princess 
was a child, she revelled in the preparations for birthday 
anniversaries, and was very fond of sprinkling the dinner- 



GARDENS AND ZEPPELINS 233 

table with flowers, taken out of any vases that might 
be standing near. The result of her efforts was to make 
the tablecloth extremely damp, and it was often difficult 
to keep bunches of greenery out of one's soup, so thickly 
was the ornamentation spread. On very special occa- 
sions she would put small vases and china groups among 
the flowers which she arranged with meticulous care. 
The round dining-table in her room had a very festive 
appearance when she had finished with it, and if one had 
difficulty in finding one's bread or in replacing a wine- 
glass after drinking, inconveniences of this kind were 
felt to be a small price to pay for the happy look of 
satisfaction in the face of the small child opposite. As 
her birthday was on September 13, a time when the 
Emperor and Empress were away at the great autumn 
manoeuvres, she usually celebrated it without the 
presence of any other members of her family, but this 
fact never seemed to trouble her at all, as she had the 
whole of the Palace on that day at her command and 
exercised the privilege to the fullest degree. 

Her chief joy was her escape from lessons, and she 
was delighted if her tutor, the day before the great 
event, inadvertently remarked, "To-morrow we will 
continue " 

" To-morrow ? " she would interrupt ; " to-morrow ? " 
Then in firm tones not unmingled with contempt, " To- 
morrow there will be no lessons." 

"Why not, Princess? " the tutor would ask with 
assumed ignorance, for the Princess had made the 



234 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

approaching anniversary the chief subject of conversa- 
tion for the last fortnight. 

She would laugh and toss her books into her desk 
with an air of relief. She hated the constant grind of 
lessons, especially when she wanted to be out in the air 
and sunlight. 

In the year 1909, the present King of Greece, with his 
wife Queen Sophie and their family, came and stayed 
for some weeks with the Emperor at the New Palace. 
There was some kind of internal trouble in Greece, and 
the Crown Prince, as he then was, had become rather 
unpopular. The eldest son, Prince George, now Crown 
Prince, was a very handsome, manly boy, and the eldest 
daughter, Princess Helene, a very charming and really 
pretty girl — not pretty merely because she happened to 
be a Princess — but of a striking beauty, and strangely 
enough, considering that she was of mixed Danish and 
German blood, of an essentially Greek type. Young 
Prince George of Greece for a time was attached to a 
Potsdam regiment, doing duty along with the Emperor's 
sons, while Prince Alexander, the second son, a boy of 
sixteen, was sent to a military cadet school, just outside 
Potsdam, and used to spend his Sundays at the Palace 
— that is, when the authorities of the school permitted. 
He complained bitterly one day to me, not, he was 
anxious to make it clear, at the early rising and incessant 
work, but at the constant strict military discipline which 
pervaded everything. 

" If a master asks, or we ask a master, the simplest 



GARDENS AND ZEPPELINS 235 

question," complained the Prince, " we have to put our 
heels together and make a military salute. It's all right 
in a regiment or when we are being drilled, but having to 
do it so constantly makes one feel like a machine. When 
I go to see my mother and she speaks to me suddenly, 
I feel my heels going together and my arms going down to 
my sides before I can answer her. It's getting to be 
automatic." 

Princess said that it was " Dumm " (stupid), and 
Prince Alexander said the life bored him dreadfully. 
He was a studious, clever boy, and like the rest of his 
family spoke fluently English, French, German, and 
Greek. 

The present King of Greece is a tall, good-looking man, 
inclined to be bald. At that time he had an uneasy, 
worried look, and both he and his wife appeared to be a 
somewhat silent couple, intimidated by the Emperor's 
more assertive personality. I think that all the 
Emperor's sisters were a little afraid of him. During 
the visit of "the Greeks," as they were called in the 
household, another sister, Princess Margaret of Hesse, 
a sweet, kind-hearted woman, came for a few days, and 
once when there was but a small table at luncheon and 
no other guests present, excepting the suite in attendance, 
the two sisters, the then Crown Princess of Greece and 
the Princess Margaret, sat one on each side of the Emperor. 
During the time the meal lasted the two Princesses hardly 
exchanged a word with their brother, while he on his 
side directed his conversation entirely to people opposite 



236 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

or at the ends of the table. Of the four sisters of the 
Emperor, none was very good-looking or distinguished 
in appearance, though the eldest one, Princess Charlotte 
of Saxe-Meiningen, had been, I was told by an old 
general of the Emperor's suite, very pretty indeed in her 
youth. The next one, now Queen Sophie of Greece, had 
a round fresh agreeable face and was a very kind and 
affable woman, but she always had an apprehensive, 
seldom-smiling expression, as though weighted with 
many anxieties, and the King's face too had a similar 
look as of gnawing cares and perplexities. They con- 
veyed the idea that their visit to the New Palace and the 
Imperial relative was not a very happy one. But they 
and their family of five children made the pleasantest 
impression of unspoiled and simple natures and of a 
happy family life. 

The third sister of the Emperor, married to Prince 
Frederick Charles of Hesse, was the Princess Margaret, 
above-mentioned, the favourite daughter of her mother 
the Empress Frederick, who left her the house at Cron- 
berg, near to Homburg, which she built after her 
husband's death, naming it after him, " Friedrichs-hof . " 

This Princess was the mother of six sons, two pairs of 
twins among them. The eldest son, Max, a mere boy, 
was killed in 1914 at the beginning of the war. He was 
one of the first of the cousins of the Emperor's daughter 
with whom I made acquaintance, as he came frequently 
with his brother "Fritz," two little boys in white sailor 
suits, to play with the little Princess. The twins were 



GARDENS AND ZEPPELINS 237 

the four youngest boys, and as " Max " and " Fritz " 
were nearly of the same height, the year's difference 
between them was not noticeable, and many people 
thought that they too were twins. 

The youngest of all the sisters was the Princess 
Adolf of Schaumburg-Lippe, a very lively lady, who had 
once been proposed as a bride for the late Prince Alex- 
ander of Battenberg, for a short time Prince of Bulgaria. 
She had no children and was in temperament something 
like her elder brother, rather restless and erratic, and 
delighted in shocking the prejudices of the Court. She 
always appeared at Court ceremonies in rather a daring 
decolletage, all the more daring and rather puzzling in 
view of the fact that in the middle of her back she had 
two large and very disfiguring black warts of unusual 
size, which, with a slight raising of what one gentleman 
called "the high- water mark " of her dress at the back 
— one which even then would have been rather below 
than above the accepted standard in such matters — 
might have been concealed, but which the Princess 
evidently determined should be revealed in their full 
ugliness. She was a tall, not ungraceful woman, with 
a queer ugly face, and used to flit through the Court on 
the rare occasions when she came to it, leaving behind 
her a track of outraged and scandalized officials. She 
was generally late for all the ceremonies, and rushed 
when she ought to have been walking with slow delibera- 
tion, and giggled when she should have been most grave. 
She loved to shatter the calm majesty and decorum of 



238 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

the stateliest ceremonies, and made audible remarks at 
inopportune moments. 

The Emperor's only brother, — two of the Empress 
Frederick's sons died in childhood, — Prince Henry of 
Prussia, and his wife, formerly Princess Irene of Hesse, 
a daughter of the English Princess Alice, were fairly 
frequent visitors to the Court. Princess Henry was not 
as good-looking as her sisters the Empress of Russia 
and the Grand-Duchess Sergius. She had a rather 
florid complexion and no graces of person beyond a 
pleasant smiling face, but she was a very kind and 
actively good-natured personality. Her husband had 
a much more distinguished appearance, especially out 
of uniform, than his brother, with whom personally he 
has little likeness. He is inclined to be lean, fairly tall, 
of bright, weather-beaten complexion, quite unlike 
the Emperor, who is not above middle height, rather 
stocky in figure, and has a sallow complexion, excepting 
after a sea-trip, when he comes back again looking 
bronzed and immensely improved. 

Once at the dinner-table, when Prince Henry was 
present, and the Emperor in a very talkative 
humour, the conversation turned on Afghanistan, and 
a question arose as to the size of that country. 

The Emperor turned to me. 

" How large is Afghanistan ? " he inquired, with his 
usual mocking tone. He was quite convinced that 
English people never knew anything, and I was not 
prepared to answer his question off-hand. 



GARDENS AND ZEPPELINS 239 

"Is it as large as Sussex ? " he persisted, while I 
hesitatingly tried to collect my scattered thoughts and 
compare Afghanistan as I knew it on the map with 
other countries in its neighbourhood. 

"Oh yes," I replied, relieved to hear a question 
which I could confidently answer correctly, " much larger 

than England " I was going on to say that I 

believed it was half as large as Germany, when the 
Emperor went on talking. 

" Larger than England ? How very large it must 
be. Dear me ! — larger than England ! " 

" Four or five times larger," I managed to call 
out. 

But the Emperor turned to his brother sitting beside 
him, and with his eyes bulging with affected astonish- 
ment said, "Did you hear that, Henry? Afghanistan 
is larger than England — larger than England." 

Everybody laughed, and then Prince Henry invited 
anyone at table to inform him of the exact size of 
Afghanistan ; but nobody could tell him, not even the 
Emperor himself, which was surprising, for he rarely 
asked anyone a question of that kind without having 
first ascertained the correct answer. 

Meantime one of the officials had sent a footman for 
a Gazetteer, and amid the hilarity of the table read 
out the exact size of Afghanistan, which was, I believe, 
600,000 square kilometres, or something of that kind, 
information conveying no definite idea to the seeker 
after knowledge. 



240 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

After this point was settled, the conversation diverged 
to other matters, but from time to time Prince Henry 
would turn to the gentleman who had sent for the 
reference book, and say, " Let me see, how large did you 
say Afghanistan was ? " But the unfortunate man could 
never remember without looking it up again. At last 
he kept the book open beside him ; but even then the 
Prince would not leave him in peace, but as the company 
rose from table challenged him once more to tell him, 
without looking at the book, the exact number of square 
kilometres in Afghanistan. 

It was Prince Henry who first persuaded the Emperor 
in 1904 to invest in an automobile, for he is an enthusi- 
astic motorist, and has also always taken a deep interest 
in the development of aviation in Germany. 

The Emperor, although later on he allowed himself 
to be persuaded into an interest in the efforts of Count 
Zeppelin's "dirigible balloons," was for a long time 
very sceptical of their future possibilities, and it was 
not until the whole of Germany was growing excited over 
them, and the first few successful flights had been made, 
■ — flights followed almost immediately after, however, by 
a series of disasters, — that he allowed himself to head 
the wave of popular enthusiasm, and in the summer of 
1909 personally invited the Count to come in his air- 
ship to Berlin, where he received a tremendous national 
ovation, and dined with the Royal Family and a large 
and brilliant company who had been commanded to 
meet him. 




WILLIAM II CONGRATULATING COUNT ZEPPELIN ON THE FIRST 

VISIT OF HIS AIRSHIP (DESTROYED BY FIRE THRP2E DAYS LATER) 

TO BERLIN 



GARDENS AND ZEPPELINS 241 

I remember that day, and all the feverish days of 
excitement that preceded it. In our calmer, more 
phlegmatic England it is difficult to make people under- 
stand with what seething excitement and interest, with 
what intense national pride and self-esteem the German 
public of all classes had greeted the flights of Count 
Zeppelin's airships, even although their destruction a 
few days after seemed to have become an almost 
inevitable consequence. 

The picture-post-card shops — and their name is 
legion in Berlin and other German towns — were filled 
with every possible kind of card, many of them of a 
very coarse nature, depicting the entire German nation 
obsessed and distracted in all its occupations by the 
possibility of an airship overhead. There was the 
bridegroom at the church door rushing away from his 
bride, the mourners at a funeral flying in a body down 
the street, the mother leaving her crying child, the 
hungry man his dinner, at the cry of " Zeppelin kommt," 
and absurd as these comic monstrosities were, they 
hardly exaggerated the attitude of the crowd. Every- 
body got what was called " Zeppelinitis," and the Court 
of Prussia shared in the general fever. Nobody could 
discuss anything but Zeppelin and the coming triumphs 
of Germany in the field of aviation. There were tre- 
mendously keen discussions at the Royal table about 
the comparative merits of the Zeppelin and Parseval 
airships, the former being rigid and the latter non-rigid. 

The several catastrophes which overtook Zeppelin air- 
16 



242 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

ships were always used as an argument against the 
rigid type. 

I confess that to me the first sight of the wonderful 
air-machine was a very beautiful and thrilling one. 
The flat roof of the Schloss in Berlin was crowded with 
ladies and gentlemen connected with the Court, and from 
the time that the first faint speck appeared on the horizon, 
gradually increasing in size until it loomed overhead, a 
vast elongated bulk against the brilliant blue sky, the 
crowded streets below took on a strange, unfamiliar 
aspect. They all turned pink with the uplifted faces 
of a gigantic crowd, and then, as the Zeppelin manoeuvred 
again and again round the Schloss, circling in majestic 
convolutions, climbing and descending, changing the 
plane of its movements with certainty and power, the 
pink of the crowd suddenly broke into a sea of white, 
the fluttering of innumerable handkerchiefs, while the 
cheers of the people, somewhat deadened by the mighty 
noise of the engines, swelled and stormed below. It was a 
beautiful, perfectly windless day, and it strikes me now 
with a strange half-comic ruefulness, that I, an alien and 
a foreigner in the land, should have felt something of 
the same thrill of enthusiasm of the people around me, 
even though the regretful thought forced itself into my 
mind that this triumph of human ingenuity and skill 
would inevitably be used for military purposes — in other 
words, with the object of destroying human life and 
human happiness. 

A few days after his great triumph there came the 



GARDENS AND ZEPPELINS 243 

inevitable anti-climax, the fall and destruction of the 
great machine that so short a time before had circled 
so proudly above our heads ; but by that time the 
German people had taken Zeppelins firmly to their 
hearts, and no disasters, not even those later ones 
involving horrible deaths by burning and drowning, 
could damp their enthusiasm for this newest war- 
machine, this huge air-monster which Germany had 
produced and brought to such perfection. 



CHAPTER XIII 
THE NAVY AND TABLE-TALK 

ONE wet afternoon in the year 1906, while the 
Court was staying in Berlin, a rather wheezy, 
whining music could be heard proceeding from 
the salon of the Princess. Its tones rose and fell, now 
seeming to come nearer, now dying away. Presently 
it increased in volume, becoming every moment more 
insistent, and the door of my sitting-room, where I was 
trying to write letters, was suddenly burst open ; and 
though at first when I looked up I could see no sufficient 
explanation of this phenomenon, presently round the 
intervening table crawled the Princess herself, on all 
fours, dragging beside her the instrument of torture — a 
kind of miniature barrel organ, with whose assistance she 
continued to play in front of me the combined roles of 
a street organ-grinder and his monkey. The man and 
the beast were alternately in the ascendant, but the 
beast appeared to be the favourite part, judging from 
the longer duration of his " turns." The music was of 
an appallingly strident nature, and continued to be 
ground out relentlessly, by man or monkey, whichever 

happened at the moment to be controlling the handle, 

244 



THE NAVY AND TABLE-TALK 245 

the gestures made by the monkey revealing a remark- 
ably intimate knowledge of the nature of these active 
quadrupeds, probably gathered during visits to the 
Berlin Zoo. 

At last, when the human element had once more 
reasserted its sway, a cap — it was a blue sailor " muffin " 
belonging to Prince Joachim — was thrust out towards 
me, and in broken German-Italian I was requested to 
give something towards the support of the proprietor 
of the organ and the monkey. Already a few nickel 
Pfennigs lay there, showing that other members of the 
household had been laid under contribution. I pre- 
sented the equivalent of a halfpenny, received with 
rapturous broken thanks from the man and extravagant 
demonstrations of joy on the part of the monkey, and 
then the Princess disappeared again, her track marked 
by the spasmodic wheezes and jerks of the instrument. 

Later on I saw her, while dressing for dinner, counting 
up her gains. 

" What shall you do with all that money, Princess ? " 
I asked. It amounted in all to about ninepence half- 
penny. 

" I shall give it to the Navy League," she said seri- 
ously, beginning to count it all over again, and I went 
out, laughing to myself to think that I had contributed 
the sum of one halfpenny to the German Navy League, 
the avowed instrument of the " blue water " party in 
Germany, which was so bitterly hostile to England and 
so determined at all costs to increase the German Navy. 



246 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

There was at that time, and indeed during all the 
years I spent in Germany, a great deal of agitation with 
regard to the German Navy. All the schools of the 
Empire had been stimulated to collect sums, which they 
had sent to the Navy League. 

" Nearly enough to buy half a destroyer," had re- 
marked one naval officer sarcastically, to whom such 
methods did not commend themselves. But every one 
was talking of the dire necessity of an increase in 
Germany's fleet ; on the plastic mind of every child, 
by means of suitable illustrated literature, the urgent 
need of the Fatherland for more ships was imprinted, 
and the public sentiment was skilfully aroused as to 
the importance of this matter. 

A few days after the organ-grinding expedition of 
the Princess, I saw for the first time the great inspirer 
of modern German naval policy, and of the Navy League, 
Gross-Admiral von Tirpitz, who lunched at the Royal 
table, where he was a fairly frequent guest. A rather 
quiet, silent man he seemed, who smiled rarely and 
fleetingly at the Emperor's quips and sallies of wit and 
appeared to have little dinner-table conversation. He 
was good-looking, of a tall, straight figure, bald-headed 
and wearing an exceptionally long thin beard. His 
face was fine-featured and rather pale, while his in- 
scrutable rather pleasant brown eyes looked as though 
he were thinking of far-away things. Before luncheon 
was served he did not enter into conversation with any 
of the suite, but after grave and formal greetings, stood 



THE NAVY AND TABLE-TALK 247 

apart wrapped in his own thoughts. His place at table 
was usually beside the Emperor, and from mine near 
the end I would often look up from my plate and catch 
the concentrated look of his brown eyes musingly fixed 
upon me, and I sometimes wondered if he were looking 
through me at something beyond, or if I reminded him 
of the British Empire and of the many things in our 
British policy that are an eternal puzzle to the German 
mind. 

When William from time to time addressed remarks 
to him he answered in rather a soft deprecatory voice, 
in as few words as possible, relapsing again into his own 
thoughts, over which he seemed to brood while the 
laughter and talk flowed unnoticed around him. 

Of all the men who came to Court, von Tirpitz always 
made upon me the impression of being the most able and 
sagacious, perhaps because he was so silent and in- 
scrutable in his ways. He never gave an opinion, never 
revealed his thoughts in public, was always coldly polite, 
formal, and dignified. He obviously kept all his con- 
versational efforts for strictly business purposes, and 
disdained to make himself agreeable and affable. The 
building of the first English Dreadnought formed at that 
time the chief topic of conversation among the upper 
social circles of Berlin. No one ever heard von Tirpitz 
air his views on them in society, but he began building 
German equivalents without any delay, wringing the 
money from a public which he had educated into a 
frenzied desire to have them. 



248 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

The following year in September 1907, I went for 
three weeks to Plon, where the young Princes were 
educated, to give some English lessons to Prince Joachim, 
and being so near to Kiel I thought it would be a pity 
not to go and see the famous harbour and the German 
fleet. So, kindly escorted by a very amiable young 
German lieutenant with whose wife I was friendly, I 
went to Kiel and saw a part of the German war-fleet 
anchored in the landlocked harbour — ten warships 
lying like flat-irons on the water. 

The lieutenant was possessed with a childlike desire 
that I should be impressed by the majesty and sufficiency 
of German naval preparedness, and took me round the 
harbour in a small steamer. 

" They are fine, are they not ? " he said, waving his 
hand at the distant warships, all anchored at equal 
distances and lying close to the water. 

" Very fine," I answered ; " nearly as fine as ours at 
home." 

He winced visibly, for it is one of the drawbacks of 
German education that it does not prepare a man for 
light badinage on subjects which touch his national pride. 

" Nearly as fine ! " he said rather angrily. " You 
wait a-while — you will see if our navy is ' nearly as 
fine.' We intend to have the best navy in the world. 
You wait just a very little longer," and he shook his 
finger menacingly in the direction of England. 

" All your warships," I said soothingly, trying to 
turn his thoughts in another direction, " burn Welsh 



THE NAVY AND TABLE-TALK 249 

coal, don't they ? — at least if they want to get up their 
best speed ? " 

He reluctantly admitted that it was so. 

" That shows how idiotic we are in England, doesn't 
it ? " I suggested. " We sell to your navy our best 
Welsh coal, while we keep on having to increase our 
naval expenditure enormously, yet if we stopped the 
supply of coal your fleet would be hopelessly crippled, 
wouldn't it ? Because the best German coal isn't 
nearly as good as ours." 

" Is that so ? " he asked, and I replied that several 
German naval officers had told me of their gratitude to 
England in this matter. 

When I returned to the New Palace from my visit 
to Plon, I informed the Princess that I had seen the 
German fleet at Kiel, whereupon she was very annoyed. 

"That isn't the German fleet," she said hotly; " that's 
only a little tiny part of it. Don't think you've seen 
the German fleet ; why, we've lots and lots more ships 
than that ! " 

I assured her that I was quite prepared to believe it. 

" We shall soon have a much bigger fleet than you 
in England," she continued. Like most children she 
was blatantly and violently patriotic. " We are going 
to keep on building and building." 

I could not resist teasing her a little. 

" Oh well, in England we shan't be just sitting still 
and doing nothing, I hope — we shall be building too." 

Hereupon she grew very angry indeed, so that I was 



250 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

glad of an interruption which put an end to our talk. 
But she must have told the Emperor something of our 
conversation, for a day or two later he came up to me 
after dinner and said in his usual jocular manner, " So 
you saw some of our German ships at Kiel, I hear. What 
did you think of them, eh ? " 

I replied that I admired them exceedingly. " Eng- 
land must look to her own laurels," I concluded laugh- 
ingly. " I see we must keep on building. No reduction 
yet possible in the Navy Estimates." 

" But it's nonsense," burst out the Emperor, " to 
talk as if the German Navy were even approximately 
near the British Navy in size. We are a long, long way 
behind. I can't understand all this outcry in England 
against Germany building ships. We naturally have 
our trade interests to safeguard, our colonies to protect. 
How are we to do it without an efficient navy ? Here 
you are building Dreadnoughts by the dozen, and if 
we build one or two there is a tremendous outcry in 
your Press." 

He went on talking for a long time, obviously deeply 
injured at the English attitude of mind with regard to 
the German Navy. 

I said that I thought it foolish of the English to 
expect any nation to stop building battleships if it chose 
to do so. 

" It seems to me," I said, " that we ought to keep 
quiet and say nothing, but keep on building too. Only 
it's rather an expensive business." 



THE NAVY AND TABLE-TALK 251 

It was a trait of the Emperor's character never to 
consider the expense of any scheme. It always irritated 
him. It appeared to him petty-minded to be trammelled 
by financial considerations. The money had to be found 
somehow. He left to others to discover how. 

" Naturally no nation can build beyond its financial 
capacity," he replied shortly; "but it is a matter of 
safeguarding the nation, and considerations of cost must 
give way to considerations of safety." 

I agreed heartily and said I supposed that was the 
reason that we in England were determined to maintain 
a very high proportional standard to the German one. 

" We have not a magnificent army like Your 
Majesty's," I remember saying. " Our fleet is our 
first line of defence." 

Our conversation, as so often happened with con- 
versations at Court, was cut off just at the moment 
when it threatened to grow interesting by the departure 
of the Empress, but it was from about that time that, 
owing to the chance remark of an adjutant, I received 
the name of " the British Dreadnought." 

" Dreadnoughts " were often talked about at the 
Royal table, the English name, pronounced with a marked 
German accent, being invariably employed. They were 
also much discussed in the newspapers, and a proper 
German equivalent for the word was eagerly sought 
for but never found, just as they were never able to 
discover a satisfactory corresponding phrase for entente 
cor Male. Two English words in constant use always 



252 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

sounded strangely to my ears when they emerged from 
the rumble of German around one. They were " hum- 
bug " (a favourite word of the Emperor) and boykott. 
This latter word was fully Germanized and appeared 
as a properly accepted verb boykottieren. 

Our table conversation at Rominten, the Emperor's 
shooting-lodge in East Prussia, from one portion of which 
the neighbouring Russian village of Wystidten could 
plainly be seen, was, I cannot explain for what reason, 
apt to be more interesting and stimulating than else- 
where. The Emperor spoke with less reserve, — though 
under no circumstances could his talk ever be called 
anything but unreserved, — perhaps I had better say with 
increased fluency and abandon, and he was as a rule 
invariably in good spirits, as he was able to enjoy un- 
interrupted sport, incessant occupation combined with 
healthy amusement, and to escape from the tedium of 
multitudinous ceremonies. 

It was at Rominten, I remember, that the Emperor 
was full of an idea of his for making a new kind of shed 
for Zeppelins, another of those gigantic war-machines 
having recently met with fresh disaster in a forced 
descent. It had been caught in a high wind when on the 
ground, hopelessly damaged, and finally entirely con- 
sumed by fire. 

He was very anxious that every one should listen to 
his theories on this new kind of air-shed, which was to 
have a roof constructed on the principle of those hurri- 
cane-proof roofs in the West Indies, where I believe the 



THE NAVY AND TABLE-TALK 253 

eaves are brought down close to the floor so that the 
wind can get no purchase upon them. The Emperor 
was quite sure that something constructed on the same 
principle would be very efficacious for Zeppelins, but he 
was never quite clear, it seemed to me, as to whether it 
was to be applied to the Zeppelins themselves or to the 
sheds. 

Another time he was very fluent on the subject of the 
Japanese, with whom, to his great indignation, England 
had just concluded a treaty. It was shortly after the 
end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. 

" You make a treaty with such people !" he exclaimed, 
turning to me and speaking angrily as though he thought 
me personally responsible — and he proceeded to tell 
various anecdotes all turning on the treachery and 
cunning of the Japanese. One was of an English naval 
captain who had had a Japanese cook serving in the 
galley of his ship. Two years later this same captain, 
on visiting a Japanese battleship, discovered that his 
former cook was one of the superior officers of the ship. 
Another story was to the effect that, during the war, 
a Russian ship, having seized and taken a Japanese 
passenger steamer, discovered among the luggage of 
some of the men on board papers setting forth, among 
other things, the number of native regiments in India, 
together with the names of their British officers, and 
copious notes as to the possibility, if trouble arose, of 
their loyalty or disaffection to the British Raj. He 
addressed these stories, which I believe to be quite well 



254 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

authenticated, across the table to me personally, speaking 
in English, and the tone of voice in which he told them 
was very angry and annoyed. When he reached the 
culminating point revealing Japanese duplicity he again 
repeated his former remark, thumping his clenched fist 
angrily on the table : 

" And with people like these you form an alliance." 

I felt almost personally guilty. 

" It proves at any rate, Your Majesty," I said, " that 
the Japanese are not at all behind Europe in their Secret 
Service organization." 

I cannot tell, to this day, if the Emperor really 
believed at that time that espionage of the kind indi- 
cated was peculiar to Japan. 

At the time of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, the 
feeling of the German public was, as far as I could gather 
from outsiders, entirely on the side of the Orientals, 
but the Emperor's sympathies, and in consequence those 
of his family, were whole-heartedly on the side of Russia. 

" If they " — meaning the Russians — " do not sweep 
back the Japanese, we shall have to do it some day," 
he often remarked. 

His little daughter, a great enthusiast for any cause 
she took up, had rather a trying time just then, for, 
anxious to have a clear and definite pronouncement on 
the subject, she demanded from every child who came in 
to play with her — two or three were invited every 
afternoon — in which direction lay their sympathies, 
Japanese or Russian. A shuffling reply was not the 



THE NAVY AND TABLE-TALK 255 

least use. If a child professed hesitation or indecision, 
she was treated with scorn as a person of vacillating 
mind, and a colourless neutrality met with all the con- 
tempt it deserved. She was very grieved, however, 
to discover that every time that she pursued the inquiry 
to the bitter end, it was always a partisan of Japan, 
rarely of Russia, that was revealed. 

She would enumerate on her ringers the chief reasons 
for her hope of Japan's ultimate defeat. 

" First of all, because they are heathen," she would 
say ; " secondly, because of Aunty Alix " (this was the 
Czarina) ; " and thirdly, because we shall have to beat 
them if the Russians don't." 

She was very anxious at first to convert her little 
companions to her own views, but happily after a time 
became preoccupied with other equally absorbing and 
less contentious subjects of conversation. 

It was always at the Rominten dinner-table that the 
Emperor talked a good deal about Russia, partly perhaps 
because it lay so few miles away. The officer in com- 
mand of the frontier Russian garrison was always 
invited to luncheon during the Emperor's three weeks' 
stay. He was a tall, straight, rather bullet-headed 
man, still quite young, and his chest was covered with 
decorations. When I once expressed to a gentleman 
of the suite my surprise that one so young as he appar- 
ently was should possess such a number of distinctions, 
he answered in a tone of contempt, " But those are only 
' Bahn-Steig Dehor ationen ' (railway-platform decorations). 



256 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

He has to form a guard of honour at the first Russian 
station whenever a royalty travels through, and they all 
send him something to add to his collection." 

The Emperor was very indignant on the subject of 
the Russian fondness for decorations and the unblushing 
way in which they begged for them. One Russian 
officer on the occasion of the Emperor's visit to the 
Czar in what was then known as Petersburg — now 
Petrograd — being asked on what grounds he considered 
himself to be deserving of a decoration, replied that he 
had been in a room on duty several times when the 
Emperor had passed through. 

There was a story too that the Emperor told every 
year at Rominten, the story of his Russian troika. It 
was a very amusing tale as related by His Majesty. On 
his State visit to the Czar after his own accession to the 
throne, he had greatly admired a Russian troika, the 
characteristic national travelling conveyance, where a 
team of three horses are harnessed abreast, of which 
the one in the middle canters, while the outsiders trot. 
The Czar presented the troika in question, including 
team, silver-mounted harness, and sleigh, to the Em- 
peror, and in due time they were all sent, under the 
charge of an Imperial Stall-Meister, or subordinate 
master-of-the-horse, to the Royal stables in Berlin and 
delivered over to the German authorities there. 

" But," as the Emperor remarked, " in transit they 
had undergone a subtle and mysterious change ; the 
horses that were sent to Berlin were not the horses I 



THE NAVY AND TABLE-TALK 257 

had seen in Petersburg — nor was the harness the same, 
though it had been very cleverly copied. The Stall- 
Meister^ had changed them en route, substituted inferior 
animals and harness and pocketed the difference. The 
Czar was informed of this very palpable peculation of 
his officials, and the Stall-Meister was deprived of his 
office and made governor of a district as a punishment ! " 

The climax of this story was always shouted out by 
the Emperor with roars of laughter and frantic table- 
thumpings. 

" Well," he would say, " Caligula made his favourite 
horse into Consul of Rome, so why not make a peculat- 
ing master-of-the-horse into governor of a Russian 
district ? " 

He was always saying that I ought to cross the 
frontier and visit the first Russian village so as to see 
the contrast between his own well-kept roads and 
houses at Rominten and those in Russia, but unfor- 
tunately there always arose some difficulty. Several 
times there were epidemics raging and at others a good 
deal of political unrest. 

Once the nearest Russian village to the Emperor's 
estate, Wystidten, was almost totally destroyed by fire, 
and the Emperor himself rode over to visit it and sent 
food and money to the unfortunate people, strange- 
looking Russian Jews, the older men wearing their hair 
in long shining ringlets. 

At Rominten the Court always indulged in fresh- 
water crayfish, almost the size of small lobsters, which 
17 



258 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

were handed round in a kind of silver fish-kettle from 
which we extricated them with long, curved silver forks. 
Though very delicious they were rather tiresome things 
to eat, as one had to dissect them very thoroughly to get 
at the best morsels which always lurked in the more 
inaccessible parts, and most of the gentlemen took them 
bodily in their hands and sucked them. In whatever 
way one chose to eat them the water in which they 
had been boiled invariably ran down one's sleeves and 
on to one's knees, so the ladies always wore their oldest 
evening-dresses when Krebs appeared on the menu, 
while an extra ten minutes or quarter of an hour was 
added on to the time occupied by dinner. Our table 
decorations were always the work of one of the Em- 
peror's Jdgers, who showed great taste in the arrange- 
ment of coloured autumn leaves, berries, fir-cones, 
and seed-pods of all kinds gathered from the hedges. 
There were no flowers in Rominten excepting a few late 
wild ones sheltering in the hedges. 

On one of the last days of our stay there the officers 
of the nearest German garrison were usually invited to 
luncheon at the Jagd-Schloss, and the men of the regi- 
ment were also inspected by the Emperor. 

During my last visit to Rominten an inspection of 
this kind took place, the men being drawn up in a 
hollow square round the four sides of the piece of grass 
and gravel around which the wooden Schloss was 
built. 

The Empress, with the Princess and the ladies, was in 



THE NAVY AND TABLE-TALK 259 

the gallery overlooking the courtyard, and we could all 
see and hear distinctly all that went on below. 

The Emperor, as has been the invariable custom 
of the Hohenzollern sovereigns, went round the ranks 
of soldiers, asking questions of them, and testing their 
general knowledge. One remark I heard as he stopped 
underneath the gallery. 

" What is a grenadier ? " 

" A soldier," was the reply. 

" Yes, but what kind of a soldier — what does he 
do? " 

I caught sight of the face of the young lieutenant in 
command of this platoon, and never saw groping per- 
plexity written more largely on any man's face. He 
would have been obviously incapable of a reply. 

The Emperor, not getting a satisfactory answer from 
the young soldier, proceeded to instruct him in the 
functions of a grenadier as primarily " a thrower of 
hand-grenades," explaining in detail how first of all a 
few grenadiers were attached to each regiment of soldiers, 
how later on whole companies of them were formed, 
and when the fashion of throwing bombs by hand went 
out, the name was still retained. 

" But it is quite possible," I heard him say, " that 
with the new explosives that have been discovered, 
hand-grenades will again be used in modern warfare 
with practical effect, and the name ' grenadier ' mean 
what it originally did." 

A certain familiarity and jocular breeziness with 



260 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

which the Emperor treated his soldiers helped to make 
him very popular with them. 

As he came on parade, either on foot or on horseback, 
or when he met them by chance out in the Potsdam 
fields, his invariable greeting of them was, " Guten 
M or gen, Kamaraden," and the stentorian reply as one 
man, " Morgen, Majestat," was wonderfully effective, and 
seemed to introduce a kind of unexpected social amenity 
into the harsh discipline of the Prussian army. 

Sometimes as I sat at my sitting-room window in 
the New Palace I would hear the new recruits at the 
barracks across the Mopke being practised in this morn- 
ing salute. They had to say it hundreds of times, until 
the words were snapped out all together like a thunder- 
clap, sudden and sharp, and without any ragged edges, 
with promptness and decision, and above all in a tone 
of overwhelming energy and strength of volume. 

The recruit with a high-pitched, squeaky voice had a 
bad time of it with the instructor. 



CHAPTER XIV 
BRITISH BLUNDERS 

HERE may be set down a few instances of the 
unfavourable, frequently ridiculous, light in 
which the English, with a strange fatality, so 
often appeared to place themselves in their dealings 
with the Germans. I only speak of the incidents within 
my own immediate knowledge, and can only hope that 
our private diplomacy eight or nine years ago was better 
than our social attempts at rapprochement, which were 
often sadly deficient in just those qualities which are 
most necessary to success, the qualities needed to con- 
ciliate and attract, but which in these instances ap- 
peared more calculated to repel and offend, still worse, 
to throw contempt on our efforts, and give an impression 
of our national want of tact, lack of punctuality, and 
general incapacity. 

One of these occasions stands out very vividly in my 
mind, because it was my first personal experience of the 
inadequacy of British methods, of the lack of means to 
an end, of the general breezy, happy-go-lucky style 
which, in dealing with a sober, serious, conscientious, 

highly-educated people like the Germans, was the 

261 



262 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

least efficacious way of winning them to our 
views. 

As a rule, the Englishman who has lived in Germany 
for any length of time, and consorted with Germans, 
speedily gains an insight into their mode of thought, 
their manner of viewing things ; and while retaining his 
own ideas on men and matters, he is able to extend 
sympathy and appreciation to the German outlook, and 
can perceive that the German development of a national 
character is necessarily and inevitably moulded by 
historical and continental necessities, just as the British 
character has developed insularly, with certain silent 
reserves and limitations unknown, and frequently mis- 
understood, in Germany. 

The type of Englishman who knows his Germany 
knows also what to avoid and what line to take in 
dealing with anything so hyper-sensitive, so open to 
attack, so highly strung and nervous as the German 
national consciousness ; he does not go blundering along, 
making a fatuous exhibition of himself and betraying 
at every step his complete indifference and ignorance 
about matters which all Germans hold most dear. He 
does not trample unnecessarily and with a blithe un- 
consciousness of harm on all their national prejudices 
and affections. But this too frequently is what our 
British representatives, men fresh from England, with 
no knowledge of Germany and its ways, appear to have 
done. 

On the particular occasion to which I have referred, 



BRITISH BLUNDERS 263 

there was a gathering together of English and Germans 
intent on creating the Anglo-German equivalent of an 
entente cordiale. A steamer-load of enthusiastic British 
gentlemen had crossed the North Sea, had visited various 
German towns, made innumerable speeches, eaten 
quantities of unknown German dishes, visited Denkmals, 
Museums, Bier-Gartens, been entertained and feted in 
the hearty German manner. Their triumphant path 
was strewn with flowers and Rhine wine, and the German 
eagle and the British lion appeared to be fraternizing 
in an agreeable if somewhat physiologically unnatural 
manner. The pacifists were more than hopeful, they 
were absolutely content. The Germans on their part 
seemed anxious to meet their British visitors half-way, 
and to extend a hospitable and friendly hand. When 
the British delegates at last arrived in Berlin, the 
Emperor invited them to the New Palace, and though not 
personally present gave them luncheon there and deputed 
officials to see that they received every possible attention 
and politeness. I remember from my window in the 
angle of the Palace standing to watch the horde of gentle- 
men who, emerging from the Palace doors, flowed in a 
black-coated flood over the terrace and steps, breaking 
up and re-forming into little constantly changing pools, 
finally being carefully shepherded into Imperial carriages 
and driven off to see Sans Souci and the Potsdam 
palaces. The Emperor, before the delegates left Berlin, 
received a deputation of them who wished to read to 
him an address. By the kindness of the Empress, 



264 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

always extremely thoughtful and considerate in such 
matters, I was allowed to be present at the ceremony. 
The Emperor and Empress and the Princess Victoria 
Louise walked first, with the ladies and gentlemen 
following, through the ornate dining-room with its 
Rococo frivolities of Apollo and the nymphs engarlanded 
in flowers, through the Roten-Kammer with its red silk 
hangings, and on till they reached the big Muchsel-Saal, 
where the deputation, a semicircle of anxious-looking 
gentlemen, some in clerical attire, the rest in ordinary 
morning dress, were standing. The Emperor bowed, 
and the address was read in clear, distinct tones by one 
of the leading members of the deputation. The Emperor 
was not, I noticed, in his usual urbane, happy humour, 
but appeared silent and preoccupied, and there was a 
consequent vague chilliness and severe formality present 
in the atmosphere, which one felt was charged with 
disappointment. For one thing, the hour for the re- 
ception of the delegates unfortunately clashed with the 
time when the Emperor and Empress would have started 
for the races at Hoppegarten. Their motor-cars were 
waiting outside to take them away, and the deputation — 
though the inconvenience of their arrival was due to a 
German official and had been arranged by him — were, 
unconsciously to themselves, regarded as something in 
the nature of a nuisance. The address was admirably 
composed, and expressed in few but happily chosen words 
the desire for the strengthening of the ties which bound 
Germany and England together, and gave utterance to 



BRITISH BLUNDERS 265 

the good wishes of the delegates for the Emperor's per- 
sonal well-being. 

At its conclusion, after the Emperor had made a 
short but formal reply, the usual less formal part of the 
ceremony began ; but, owing to the want of warmth and 
spontaneity in the Emperor's conversation with the 
leader of the delegates, a gentleman who grew ob- 
viously more nervous and ill at ease as time went on, 
the interview can hardly have done much to forward the 
enterprise on behalf of which it was arranged. It was 
unfortunate, because the Emperor in his more cheerful 
moods is a very ingratiating personality and has a charm 
of manner which takes captive the judgment of many 
serious and learned men who come within the sphere of 
its influence. But when anything has perturbed his 
mind, or he is suffering from annoyance, he has not the 
faculty of conquering or putting it aside. He is a man of 
" moods " — cheerful moods on the whole, but sometimes 
very much the contrary. He is one of the men whose 
judgment is liable to be warped by personal feeling. 

But the visit of the deputation, if not conspicuously 
successful, was by no means a failure. It was reserved 
for the last final effort of the English in Berlin to deal a 
severe blow to my national pride. An informal gathering 
and supper had been arranged where Germans and 
English would meet and fraternize, swear eternal friend- 
ship, and pledge themselves to work together for a 
better understanding of each other, an object with which 
I was heartily in accord. Accompanied by a German 



266 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

friend — a professor of one of the universities — I wended 
my way to the big hall where the reception was held, 
and found it already in full swing. The people were 
scattered about at little tables listening to music, there 
was a representative gathering of Germans and English- 
men seated on the platform above the audience, while 
the German and British flags were lovingly entwined 
together in a wealth of evergreens. When the music 
was finished and the applause had died down, the head- 
master of one of the big Government schools in Berlin 
rose up and made a speech in English — a clear, well- 
enunciated speech — for every German, as a child, is 
painstakingly trained to express himself, not only in 
well-chosen language, but in tones which will make no 
excessive demands on the aural capacities of the hearer ; 
" mumbling " is not permitted, but a rather shouting, 
declamatory style is encouraged in announcing even 
the smallest incident. So the German's speech had 
nothing of the shamefaced modesty which often char- 
acterizes English orators and makes them appear anxious 
to conceal rather than reveal their ideas to an expectant 
audience, and the matter was no less good than the 
delivery. It was lucid and convincing, pointing out 
the patent benefits of an Anglo-German alliance ; it 
was full of practical common sense, but touched also 
with appealing sentiment ; it alluded to the mutual 
indebtedness of German and English literature, con- 
tained apposite quotations from Shakespeare which it 
is probable that many of the English present failed to 



BRITISH BLUNDERS 267 

recognize, and was, from every point of view, an admir- 
able and excellent address which made a very happy 
impression on the audience. He was followed by an 
English gentleman, newly arrived in Germanjr, who 
stepped from among the group on the platform, and in 
the well-known English parliamentary manner, in an 
agreeable, breezy, electioneering style, his thumbs in the 
armholes of his waistcoat, — an attitude which to a German 
is exceedingly strange and unvornehm — undignified, — he 
proceeded, in a jaunty, easy, light-hearted way, to 
harangue that serious cultivated audience of expectant 
Germans. I can never forget the acute agony of mind 
which I suffered during the next few minutes. If, at 
the risk of broken bones, a trap-door in the floor had 
opened and swallowed me up, so that I had been spared 
the frightful exhibition that gentleman made of himself, 
I should have been eternally grateful. I still wince at 
the recollection and at the shame of it, at his fatuous 
smiles and wriggles, at his feeble, laboured, quite in- 
comprehensible witticisms, at his childish appeals and 
assertions that if the people there assembled together 
would only continue to drink tea together for a few 
months longer England and Germany would be welded 
into an abiding friendship which no diplomatic blunders 
could assail. He appeared to have nothing whatever 
to say and eked out the paucity of his ideas by a multi- 
plicity of words and sentences which, beginning with a 
promise of something vital and interesting, died away 
in meaningless puerilities and vapidness. The perora- 



268 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

tion and conclusion of his speech was an attempt to 
lisp out a German sentence which he appeared to have 
painfully acquired a few hours previously and subse- 
quently forgotten, retaining in his memory merely some 
broken fragments andchippings of a once noble sentiment. 
After he had jerked and wriggled himself to the 
painfully childish conclusion of his attempt to cement 
Anglo-German friendship, I, in an agony of mental 
humiliation, escaped into the night to ponder, as the 
train carried me back to the New Palace, on our strange 
English methods of doing things, of our choice of men, 
of our neglect of those who can, and our patronage of 
those who can't. I reflected on the Englishmen who 
knew how to handle German audiences and could speak 
their language, and of the painful blunderer to whom 
had been entrusted a delicate task for which he was 
palpably unfitted. I wondered if all nations were guilty 
of these mistakes, or if it were an English monopoly. 
I thought of the late Sir Robert Collins, who was at 
that time gentleman-in-waiting to the Duchess of 
Albany, and a cultured man of the world, speaking 
fluent German, full of subtle tact and sympathy, and I 
reflected on the impression he had made at fhe Prussian 
Court during the two years he had resided at Potsdam 
in attendance on the Duchess. How agreeably surprised 
and pleased they had been at his knowledge of German 
history and literature, at his general culture, — nothing 
appeals like culture to the German mind, — and at his 
surprising capacity — he was no longer very young — as 



BRITISH BLUNDERS 269 

a sportsman, on the ice, or in the saddle. A fein- 
gebildeter Mann he had often been called, with a tone 
of genuine admiration and liking not always heard 
when a German speaks of an Englishman. There were 
many men of his type in England, but we did not appear 
to use them. The best of the English nation was kept 
in the background, doing the quiet work which tells in 
the long run and waiting doubtless to repair with 
blood and toil the harm wrought by the fatuous 
blunderer. 

Some minor contretemps of perhaps no grave im- 
portance in themselves occurred when the late King 
Edward visited the Prussian Court. On the first 
occasion when he visited the Emperor and Empress at 
Wilhelmshohe his arrival was timed for nine o'clock 
in the morning, so that the whole population of 
Wilhelmshohe and the neighbouring town of Cassel were 
early astir and lined up on the route in good time. All 
the school children were granted a holiday by the 
Emperor. I have heard him remark that nothing roots 
a monarch so firmly in the affections of the rising 
generation as the frequent remission of a certain amount 
of the hours of study ; it was one of the Imperial privi- 
leges which he most frequently exercised, and the 
announcement in the schools of Berlin, as soon as the 
scholars assembled, — for they were never told the day 
before that they need not appear, — that " His Majesty 
the Emperor has ail-graciously decreed to-day as a holiday 
on account of " was always greeted with lusty cheers 



270 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

and wavings. So the school children of Cassel and 
Wilhelmshohe were there in large numbers under the care 
of their teachers, waving flags, full of excitement and 
anticipation. They " waited and waited and waited," 
as one of them described it, and then word came that fog 
in the Channel had delayed the King's arrival and he 
would consequently be late; so the people kept on waiting, 
the State officials wandered disconsolately up and down 
between the station and the Castle, the soldiers lining 
the route grew more and more weary in the hot sun, 
the smaller children had to be sent home, and the older 
ones grew very tired and lost some of their first fresh en- 
thusiasm. No one knew exactly when the King might 
be expected, and, as frequently happens, the delay on the 
water led to further delays on land, and the Royal train 
was held up at unexpected places in Germany, and nobody, 
not even the Court officials, who were continually 
receiving telegrams from various places en route, could 
definitely say at what time the King would arrive. 

Now nothing upsets officials of the German Court — 
and also, I should imagine, of any other Court — than a 
hitch in the proceedings. It throws everything out of 
gear and has strange unforeseen ramifications and conse- 
quences. It nullifies all previous orders and destroys 
all the carefully thought-out arrangements made 
with such painstaking, almost meticulous care. It puts 
everybody, with every excuse, into a bad temper, and 
it was particularly unfortunate on this occasion, as the 
King's visit had been eagerly anticipated by the Prussian 



BRITISH BLUNDERS 271 

Court, and everything possible done to give him a hearty 
reception. 

He arrived finally somewhere about twelve o'clock, 
and drove by the Emperor's side through the cheering 
crowds up to the beautiful Castle, where his charmingly 
tactful personality soon obliterated the memory of the 
inconvenience caused by the unpunctuality of his arrival. 
But there were not wanting many people who murmured 
and grumbled and pointed a moral. 

" Always, when the English come, something goes 
wrong. The English are never punctual. Our Emperor 
is always there in time." 

Even the excellent speech made by the King in Ger- 
man at the banquet in the Castle in the evening, a speech 
widely reproduced and commented upon with much 
approval by the German Press, did not, in the minds of 
the public, make up for the delay and consequent in- 
convenience of his arrival. 

It was at this banquet, while making his speech, 
that the King, at a momentary loss for an expression 
which eluded him, turned to Bulow, then Imperial 
Chancellor, asking him to supply the missing word, 
which he promptly did. All the German gentlemen of 
the suite who were present commented on this slight 
lapse of memory and the King's readiness in rinding a 
way out of the difficulty. His fluent command of their 
language was always very flattering to the Germans. 

" He speaks it like a born German," they would often 
say to me. 



272 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

A few years later, when the King, accompanied by 
Queen Alexandra, came to Berlin in State, the year 
before his own death, his arrival was absolutely punctual, 
but even then there were certain " regrettable incidents " 
which might by a little foresight have been avoided. 
The arrival of the Royal train was described to me when 
she returned by the young Princess, now Duchess of 
Brunswick, who at that time was a girl of sixteen, and 
had accompanied her parents and brothers to the station. 

" We were all there," she said, " as the train steamed 
in, standing on the red carpet ; the guard of honour 
presented arms, the band played ' God Save the King,' 
we wore our most welcoming expressions, all the officials 
put their heels together and bowed, but — nothing 
happened ! There was no King and no Queen to be seen 
— the saloon appeared to be empty, and all that was 
visible in the corridors were frantic footmen and Jdgers 
dashing up and down. The band went on playing, the 
soldiers went on presenting arms, we looked at each other 
and wondered what to do next. Then suddenly we saw 
the King getting out right at the very end of the train 
where there wasn't anything but porters and servants 
waiting to take away the luggage. Of course we all 
rushed down there, Papa and Mama and the gentlemen 
and all of us tearing along, and all the officials, and the 
band stopped and then began again — they'd played ' God 
Save the King ' four times already — and there, on that 
horrid bit of platform, smelling of I don't know what, 
all crowded up into a tiny space where we couldn't move 



BRITISH BLUNDERS 273 

without treading on each other's toes, we welcomed 
' Onkel Edward ' to Berlin — not a very good beginning, 
was it ? " 

It subsequently transpired that the King, leaving his 
own State saloon in the middle of the train to visit Queen 
Alexandra in her apartment farther down, some shunting 
operations had taken place at the last stoppage before 
reaching Berlin, and carriages without corridor com- 
munication had been interposed, so that His Majesty 
found it impossible to regain his own saloon. 

However, in spite of the inauspicious beginning, 
" Onkel Edward " managed to make a good impression 
on the people of Berlin, more particularly on the burghers 
who entertained him at the newly-completed Rath-Haus. 
These gentlemen, among the most cultivated and liberal- 
minded of the Empire, were delighted with the King's 
command of their language and the geniality and kind- 
ness of his manner. Edward VII at that time was in 
but indifferent health, and travelled accompanied by a 
trained nurse, but he did not spare himself in the least, 
and cheerfully went through all the arduous duties of 
receptions, theatrical performances, and public appear- 
ances which filled up the week of his stay. 

One other " rift within the lute " occurred during 

the visit of the English Konigs-paar, as they were called 

in Berlin. One afternoon, passing through a corridor 

of the Castle, I met the two youngest sons of the Emperor, 

the Princes Oskar and Joachim, wearing full-dress uniform 

and looking rather bored and evidently suffering from a 
18 



274 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

grievance. They both fell on me as the only outlet for 
emotions which were becoming too strong for them, and 
began to bemoan the fact that they had been waiting an 
interminable time and were not able to go out or do the 
things that they expected and desired to do, as they were 
waiting for a summons to the King of England's apart- 
ment, as he wished to bestow a decoration upon each of 
them. The Princes appeared to me more acutely alive 
to the inconvenience rather than to the honour to which 
they were destined, and indeed it is strange how little the 
most highly-coveted honours are valued by those to 
whom they come with a certain monotonous ease. They 
seemed to think that being English I could explain why 
they were kept cooling their heels and wasting their 
time for so long. 

" Here we've been sitting for nearly two hours, wait- 
ing and waiting and waiting," grumbled Prince Joachim. 
He used exactly the same expression as the little girl 
had done at Wilhelmshohe. 

I tried in vain to discover palliative circumstances 
and suggested sending a footman to the King's apart- 
ments to discover what was the cause of the delay in the 
summons, but a messenger appearing at that moment 
at the end of the corridor, both Princes dashed in his 
direction, and I was glad to escape from further 
questioning. 

Later on in the evening I saw Prince Oskar again. 

"Well," he said gloomily, " we didn't get our decora- 
tions after all." 




PRINCE OSCAR OF PRUSSIA, FIFTH SON OF THE GERMAN 
EMPEROR 



BRITISH BLUNDERS 275 

" What ! " I exclaimed, aghast. " Not after all that 
waiting ? Why ever not ? " 

"Because," he answered grimly, "it seems that we 
already had them. The King had given us both the 
Victoria Order when he came to Wilhelmshohe three 
years ago, and it seems that was the Order he wished to 
present to us to-day, so when somebody at the eleventh 
hour discovered that we had already got it, the whole 
thing was off of course, and our waiting was all in vain." 

"But how exceedingly idiotic," I exclaimed, feeling 
very angry with the unknown official responsible for this 
piece of stupidity. " Naturally the King can't remember 
every Order he presents, but why didn't the responsible 
gentleman, whoever it was, look up the list and tell the 
King that your Royal Highness already had received 
the Order ? " 

" Yes. Why indeed ? " returned the Prince ; then in 
a kindly tone, seeing I was rather disturbed, "Still, we 
have our own stupid German officials too. I think that 
living at Court is apt to sap one's brains," and smilingly 
he passed on, leaving me trying to believe, but with no 
very great success, that such incidents were liable to occur 
everywhere. Still I was convinced that they did not 
happen at the Court of William II. 

Perhaps the very worst result of English negligence 
was, however, on the occasion of the visit of the late 
Lord Roberts to Berlin, where great preparations were 
made by the Emperor for his reception, a guard of 
honour sent to the station, and the Crown Prince deputed 



276 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

to meet him there. On the morning of his presumed 
arrival every arrangement was carried out with great 
exactitude, the guard of honour went early to the station, 
the Crown Prince was there waiting, everything possible 
had been done to honour the old warrior, but when the 
train arrived he was not in it, had never been in it, but 
was at that moment lying ill in bed at his hotel in Vienna. 
The day before, as soon, in fact, as his illness had shown 
the utter impossibility of his visit to Berlin on the ap- 
pointed day, — he was suffering from rather a severe chill, 
— he had without delay telegraphed to the British 
Embassy in Berlin to that effect, asking them to take 
the necessary steps to inform the Emperor, and to ask 
that the ceremonies arranged for his reception should be 
postponed until he was able to travel, which he hoped 
to do in two days' time. This telegram — the Emperor 
himself told me this — duly arrived at the British Em- 
bassy, but was not then opened because the attache 
whose duty it was to open official telegrams happened 
to be absent for a few days ! Whether this was the real 
explanation I cannot tell. It sounds almost incredible, 
but it was the one believed by the Emperor and his suite, 
and did not add to their respect for our diplomatic 
organization. 

The Emperor himself entertained the opinion — with, 
I must admit, some sufficient reason — that English 
attaches were of a lazy, pleasure-loving disposition, re- 
garding their posts as mere opportunities for seeing 
the world, and not at all anxious to make them profit- 



BRITISH BLUNDERS 277 

able to their country. I remember him coming in to 
luncheon one day full of scorn of one English officer 
then staying at the British Embassy. His Majesty 
had invited him to see some rather interesting early- 
morning manoeuvres which were to take place near 
Potsdam, but the gentleman in question never put in 
an appearance, although a horse and an orderly had 
been told off for his benefit. 

" Too early for him to get up in the morning, I sup- 
pose," scoffed the Emperor, who, when on manoeuvres, 
was, with his sons, always in the saddle by five o'clock 
in the morning. 

His Majesty was never able to get over the fact that 
our English Ministers of War were frequently — indeed 
one might say invariably — gentlemen of no military 
training whatever, and he was continually telling the 
anecdote of his offer to Lord Haldane of an opportunity 
to be present at the German autumn manoeuvres, and 
that gentleman's confession that he must decline it as he 
was no horseman. 

He several times asked me how it was that we ap- 
pointed men to the office of War Minister, as he called 
it, whose qualifications for that office were not at all 
obvious. 

" They know absolutely nothing about military 
matters, it seems to me," he said, knitting a perplexed 
brow, " and yet you pay them a very large salary, much 
higher than we do in Germany ; but ours are experts, 
yours are amateurs." 



278 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

I murmured something deprecatory, alluding to 
our parliamentary system and popular government, 
ending up with Cromwell and our fear of a military 
dictatorship. I felt I was skating on very thin ice 
when I found myself, before I realized what I was doing, 
saying to the Emperor, " In Germany the army is 
the master of the people, in England we look upon it 
as our servant." 

" But even that," laughed William, " does not ex- 
plain why you put the affairs of the army into the hands 
of an untrained man." 

It was happy for me, when somewhat depressed 
in spirit by the apparent perfection of German methods 
and the equally apparent lack of organization and 
forethought in our own British manner of doing things, 
that I was prevented from falling into the lower deeps 
of despondency by association with one of the gentlemen 
of the Court who proved a salutary antidote to my de- 
jected moods. Not indeed in any spirit of contrast, 
for his was a mind naturally pessimistic in cast and 
wrapped in impenetrable gloom, with an inherent 
capacity for seeing the weak points in circumstances or 
people. 

He usually formed one of the suite of the Empress 
when the Court was on what might be called its summer 
holiday in July and August. There were then unusual 
opportunities for us to exchange views on various 
subjects, and he was, as far as I could discover, the only 
German of the Court who appeared to have any mis- 



BRITISH BLUNDERS 279 

givings as to the absolute excellence of German methods 
of government. On the contrary, he was gifted with 
a Cassandra-like facility of prophetic foreboding and 
denunciation which at the time I thought exaggerated, 
but now perceive to have been permeated by a good 
deal of truth and foresight. 

He had a blunt, rather ferocious, manner of stating 
things to the Empress, who valued him highly, while 
ridiculing all he said. There was no doubt that his 
propensity for seeing clearly was accentuated by the 
servility and easy smoothness, and somewhat mawkish 
atmosphere of the Court, where every one, perhaps un- 
consciously, combined to present a false view, or at 
least a warped view, of things to those " born in the 
purple." 

Once I remember at Cadinen, I was strolling along 
the straight, tree-bordered, unfenced road leading from 
Elbing to Frauenburg, the ancient town of whose red- 
brick cathedral Copernicus was once lay-canon. The 
road ran past the farmyard which nestled so confidingly 
under the very nose of the Royal Schloss. In Germany 
it is considered a sign of supersensitiveness and deficiency 
in practical common sense to object to farmyard odours. 
In Hesse, indeed, does not every manure heap occupy 
a position in the main street immediately underneath 
the windows of the best parlour ? As I wandered on 
past the cowsheds, admiring the brilliant masses of 
corn-flowers and poppies which bordered the road, I 
came upon the cynical gentleman, his gaze fixed upon 



28o MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

the telegraph poles, which could be followed for some 
distance in diminishing perspective. 

" Dumm ! " (" Stupid ! ") was his ejaculation at catch- 
ing sight of me. 

I stopped and looked at him inquiringly. As far 
as could be seen we two were the only living things in 
sight, with the exception of a few geese wandering over 
the stubble fields. 

"You allude, I suppose, to the telegraph posts? " 
I suggested. They had been erected since our last 
visit the year before, and were one of the obvious neces- 
sities of the Emperor's occupation of the then 
newly- acquired Cadinen estate. 

He shook his head in a manner suggestive of feelings 
too deep for expression, and then, in a flood of abuse 
of Government methods, pointed out to his own satis- 
faction, but in a series of arguments too rapid and in- 
volved for me to follow, that if the authorities had only 
had the sense to erect the posts on the other side of 
the road, the extension of the East Prussian telegraph 
system which was planned for the following year could 
have been carried out without the expense of the 
erection of a second line of posts. He inveighed against 
the crass stupidity of people who committed such 
follies, but of course, he said, it was only a further 
example of the colossal stupidity with which everything 
in Germany was managed. 

I was so gratified at all he said, that when he 
stopped, almost suffocated by the warm convincingness 



BRITISH BLUNDERS 281 

of his own arguments, I began to thank him with 
effusion. 

" How comforting it is ! " I exclaimed, " how 
gratifying ! To hear that England does not possess 
the only Government in the world capable of making 
mistakes. I thought that here in Germany such things 
could not possibly happen." 

He made a large gesture to the heavens with his 
hands as though invoking the aid of higher powers to 
give me understanding, and shaking his head solemnly 
and with an air of implacable melancholy, he retired 
up the road towards Elbing, leaving me to wonder if, 
in any age of the world's history, there had ever existed 
any Government which earned the unqualified approba- 
tion of all parties of the State. 



CHAPTER XV 
CONCLUSION 

ON the evening of May 24, 1913, I stood 
among the crowd of ladies and officers who 
from the gallery of the White Hall in the 
Royal Castle of Berlin were watching the scene below, 
one of marvellous beauty, full of sparkle and colour. 

It was during the progress of the Torch Dance, that 
old custom, the concluding ceremony of all wedding 
festivities held at the Prussian Court, which each bride 
and bridegroom of the house, not even excepting the 
Emperor and Empress Frederick, though they were 
married in England, must lead. 

A constantly reiterated old-world melody to the 
accompanying blare of trumpets sounded from the 
musicians' gallery opposite, where the band of the 
Guards was playing with their accustomed fervour 
and skill, while down below, on the polished floor of 
the hall, the Emperor's only daughter, the bride of the 
occasion, with her bridegroom, the young Prince Einest 
of Cumberland, since then succeeded to the Duchy of 
Brunswick, moved, preceded by a dignified Master of 

the Ceremonies and twelve scarlet-clad pages bearing 

282 



CONCLUSION 283 

long flaring torches, round and round the large hall in 
stately promenade, the bride leading out at each circling 
of the room two of the male Royalties among the wedding 
guests, while the bridegroom did the same with the 
ladies among them. 

There was a wonderful sweeping of Court trains on 
the floor, that of the bride in white and silver being 
carried by four young maidens in shorter ones of rose- 
colour. 

King George and Queen Mary of England were 
walking for the first — and probably the last — time 
of their lives in the historic dance, while the Czar of 
all the Russias, own cousin of the bridegroom and of 
the British sovereign, with a grave smile on his face, 
took his part also in the pleasant ceremony, his hand 
in one of the bride's, while her other was given to King 
George. Round they paced each in their turn, until 
at last the younger Princes and Princesses — there are 
so many of them in Germany — came on in threes and 
fours, — otherwise the dance might have stretched into 
midnight, — and moved in a chain of smiling youth down 
the polished floor. 

Peeping over the marble rail of the gallery were two 
young lieutenants in uniform whom I had last seen only 
three years before in sailor suits. They were the cousins 
and former playfellows of the Emperor's daughter, the 
two young Princes Max and Fritz of Hesse, the elder 
of whom was killed at the beginning of the European 
War. They had evidently preferred to look on rather 



284 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

than take part in the brilliant spectacle, and watched 
with deep interest their parents, the Prince and Princess 
Frederick Charles of Hesse, the latter a sister of the 
Kaiser, as they came down from the dais and took their 
part in the moving picture down below. 

All round the hall, in the gallery, and on the wide 
stairs leading up to it, a crowd of courtiers looked and 
whispered. Everybody was in good humour and charmed 
with everything. It looked as though universal peace 
had settled upon the nations. At no former Prussian 
wedding — not even that of the Crown Prince — had 
there been two crowned heads among the guests, and 
those, moreover, of Russia and Great Britain, the countries 
of whom Germany was most suspicious. It was, every 
one decided, a happy augury ; and not less so the 
apparent ending of the unhappy quarrel between the 
Emperor and the Duke of Cumberland, father of the 
bridegroom, heirs to a feud begun in the time of a former 
generation. 

So that never before had there been such a delightful 
sense of peace and harmony, of genuine delight in a 
pleasant spectacle, of sympathy and joy with the young 
couple, of belief that the future would be better than 
the past. 

When the ceremony came to an end, when the bride 
and bridegroom had at last finished their task, when the 
last guest had returned to the dais, the Emperor gave 
a signal, and the line of red pages, still carrying their 
torches, turned towards - the wide exit, the bride and 



CONCLUSION 285 

bridegroom followed them hand in hand, the two 
Emperors, the Empress, King George, Queen Mary, 
followed by the rest of the Royal guests, walking in 
stately procession, slowly disappeared from view, while 
from the gallery above the music became fainter and 
all the beautiful moving panorama of colour down below 
gradually dissolved as though it had never been. 

If those who watched had only known, it was the 
close of an era that they were beholding, the sunset of 
the world's friendship. 

That was the last meeting of the Czar with the 
German Emperor before the war. When he departed 
for Russia an hour or two after he had danced with the 
smiling bride, could he have foreseen what the following 
year was to bring ? 

King George and Queen Mary remained yet two days 
longer in Berlin, appearing upon the last night of their 
stay in the State box at the Opera with the Emperor, 
who explained to them the various scenes of the work 
performed, "Corcyra," written by Imperial command 
round the various dances of the peasants of Corfu, the 
Greek island where His Majesty some years ago bought 
the palace built by the late Empress of Austria. 

The King and Queen went away leaving golden 
impressions behind them, and the Prussian Court settled 
down to an unaccustomed quiet, the departure of the 
only daughter having left an inappeasable vacancy, in 
which respect Courts and humbler people are much 
akin. 



286 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

An interpreter of omens might perhaps have dis- 
covered a foreshadowing of events in an incident which 
occurred at the very end of the wedding festivities. 

When the bridal procession had vanished from the 
White Hall, when the music had died away, and the 
lights were being extinguished one by one, leaving only 
the corridors illuminated, down which the stream of 
guests outside the Royal circle were returning, I found 
myself walking with the decorous crowd of ladies with 
their trains over their arms, with gorgeous chamberlains 
in their coats stiff with gold embroidery, wearing the 
gold key emblematic of their office, and officers of the 
army and navy. There was no crush, no crowding in 
the spacious galleries, time for greetings and talk with 
old acquaintances of bygone days. But when we passed 
through the ponderous doors at the end, opened and 
shut by Royal lackeys, we came upon a scene of strange 
disorder and confusion. Everybody appeared to be 
pushing and struggling and thrusting at each other. 
Somebody cannoned against me with such irresistible 
force that I was cast bodily on to the capacious chest of 
a very tall and stately — at least he would have been 
stately if circumstances had allowed it — gold-laced 
official. I still remember the very scratchy feeling of 
the gold lace as it scraped my face and arms. I re- 
bounded from him into the arms of a Kammer-herr 
opposite, an old friend as it happened, who received my 
sudden onslaught charmingly, and declared himself 
delighted to see me — a proof, I thought, on his part of 



CONCLUSION 287 

splendid presence of mind and good humour. But we 
had not time to say more, for to our horror we suddenly 
found ourselves being roughly thrust upon certain 
Royalties, those whom only half an hour before we had 
seen passing with so much state down the hall. Here 
they were, in some mysterious manner in the central 
vortex of a very badly-behaved crowd, for the roughness 
and absolute lack of courtesy of the young officers in it 
were the following day the subject of universal comment. 
Every one could see that the confusion was chiefly owing 
to the rough by-play and uncontrolled spirits of a group 
of young lieutenants who appeared to think it good 
fun to push and charge into the crowd from the out- 
skirts. A few of the older men and the Court officials 
did their best to protect the ladies, but the young officers 
hustled and thrust regardless of consequences, and seemed 
to have quite lost any sense of decent behaviour. Some 
of those near me kept on apologizing profusely, but all 
the time were evidently doing their best to increase the 
confusion, behaving generally in a very ill-mannered 
way. 

The whole situation was very unpleasant and chaotic. 
The ladies' veils and dresses were torn and jerked, they 
were flung backwards and forwards, and shouts and 
screams of remonstrance could be heard, adding obviously 
to the joy of the " hooligans " of the crowd. But when 
the various Royalties who were trying to pass through 
the room to their apartments began too to be tossed and 
hustled violently back and forth, matters were felt to be 



288 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

serious, the officials remonstrated angrily in stentorian 
tones, and the Master of the Ceremonies, the Prince 
Fiirstenburg, he who half an hour before had been leading 
the pages of the Torch Dance with stately tread, seizing 
his long wand of office struck it angrily against the 
floor, haranguing the mob, for it was nothing else, in 
stern and angry tones, and in a few minutes order was 
restored, and the Royalties, with somewhat ruffled plumes, 
were able to pass on their way. 

The cause of the concentration of the crowd in this 
apartment had been to obtain one of the white silk 
ribbons bearing the cipher of the bride and the date of 
her wedding — the so-called Bride's Garter, which was 
distributed by her Mistress of the Robes. This lady, 
being somewhat unnerved by the crowd which bore 
upon her, and further handicapped by her long white 
gloves, which stuck to the fringes of the ribbons and 
prevented her from handling them with speed, fumbled 
over her task and was so slow about it that the worst 
elements of the crowd — there is no crowd quite so ruth- 
less and selfish as a well-dressed one — began to get 
restive. Some people received half a dozen pieces of 
ribbon and some had none. 

The Emperor, when he heard next day of the dis- 
orderly scene, was extremely angry, and decreed that at 
no future wedding should there be any Garter-distribu- 
tion by the Mistress of the Robes, but that everybody 
entitled to receive one should have it by post. 

But, as a matter of fact, the other weddings of his 



CONCLUSION 289 

sons all took place during the war, in somewhat hasty 
fashion, with none of the accustomed ceremonies, and 
the Torch Dance of his daughter's marriage was the last 
time of its performance in his family. 

About four years before the wedding, the Arch-Duke 
Franz Ferdinand, with his morganatic wife, the Duchess 
of Hohenburg, had visited the Emperor at the New 
Palace. The Arch-Duke was a stout, rather truculent- 
looking individual of no pronounced qualities of mind 
as far as one could gather. His wife appeared to be 
decidedly the better half, and made a very pleasant 
impression upon the Empress and the ladies of the Court. 

After their departure, frequent and heated discussions 
took place among the ladies with regard to the position 
of the Duchess whenever her husband should become 
Emperor, especially in view of the complicated situa- 
tion arising from the fact that though by the Constitu- 
tion she could never succeed to the throne of Austria, 
barricaded as it is by stringent laws of succession, yet 
there was no reason why she should not ascend that of 
Hungary. The Duchess was very popular among the 
clergy of the Roman Catholic Church, and it was believed 
by many that they would have thrown the whole weight 
of their influence into the attempt to get her acknow- 
ledged as reigning Empress ; while, on the other hand, 
it was maintained that neither the old aristocracy of 
Austria, so tenacious of its rights, nor the next heir to 
the throne after Franz Ferdinand, would be likely to 
tolerate the granting of Imperial rights to a line whose 
19 



2go MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

claims were so patently unlawful. However, in due 
time the assassin's bullet settled this question once and 
for all ; but as I look back and think of this graceful 
woman, not beautiful, but of a pleasant, intelligent 
type of face, with her uninteresting spouse, to whom she 
was deeply devoted, and of the fact that their assassina- 
tion at Sarajevo was the pretext and signal for the 
outbreak of the most dreadful war that has ever been 
chronicled, when I consider that the fate of these two 
people, insignificant in personality and of no intrinsic 
value to the world, should have been the means of setting 
alight the flame that has devastated Europe, I wonder 
at the supine gullibility of nations, at their willingness 
to slay and be slain for a cause which is hid from them, 
at the waste of so much splendid valour and precious 
human life for a thing of so infinitely little worth, the 
prestige of a vain and futile monarchy and the ambition 
and pride that lie at the root of every war that has 
ever been. 

Many people have pondered the problem of the 
personal share of the German Emperor in this war, and 
of the genuineness or otherwise of his reiterated aspira- 
tions after world-peace. Of a deliberate intention to 
provoke, or a desire for war he may perhaps be acquitted, 
but that his temperament and cast of mind have had 
their due share in the catastrophe there can be little 
doubt. Perhaps it is not given to a man brought up 
in the atmosphere of Courts, and gifted with the assertive 
personality which quells and cows remonstrance, to be 



CONCLUSION 291 

able to see clearly the ultimate issues of the steps he 
takes and their effect upon other minds. The German 
Emperor has received an essentially military training ; 
his chief advisers, his chief companions, those whose 
influence has most moulded his thought, have been 
military men, obsessed with the military idea, which 
percolates continually even to the art and literature of 
modern Germany. 

As a boy he lived in the days of the Franco-Prussian 
War, when as yet there was no German Emperor and his 
grandfather was only King of Prussia. All his young 
enthusiasm was stirred by the swift and victorious events 
of those early days when the German Empire was founded 
and the Imperial crown descended on his family. His 
father's death and his early ascent of the throne, com- 
bined with his own striking and audacious personality, 
have made him into a very complacent personage. He 
never desires to be anything but assertive. His histrionic 
tastes, which are very much in evidence, tell him that 
a modest Emperor is something of an anomaly, a failure, 
and a mistake. An Emperor must be Imperial in word 
and deed, must think and live imperially, and so William 
has always striven to do this. He openly scoffs at the 
idea of an Emperor going out attended only by one 
adjutant. 

"That might do for my grandfather's time," he has 
been heard to say, "but we live in another century." 

He has certain Napoleonic traits in his character — 
a love of splendour in his Court, a yearning after the 



292 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

spectacular, a desire to strike the public eye and the 
public imagination. 

When he so often reiterated in bygone days his ardent 
hope to preserve the peace of the world, he was no doubt 
quite sincere in what he said, but together with this 
desire was coupled also a talent for doing and saying 
many things opposed to it — a contradiction in conduct 
not unfrequently found combined in other persons. He 
never perceived that his own good intentions were not as 
obvious to the world as his military speeches and acts. 
He was often violently angry with irresponsible sections 
of the English Press, attributing to their utterances a 
Government inspiration which was palpably absent. He 
was a man who both publicly and privately seemed to 
inspire a certain amount of distrust in his sincerity, a 
doubt as to whether his speech was the true reflex of his 
mind, whether his apparent frankness of utterance did 
not hide other intentions than those expressed. Those 
of his own subjects who came into frequent and immedi- 
ate contact with him, though absolutely loyal, were not 
as devoted to him personally as had been the servants 
of his grandfather, William I, who seems to have inspired 
an affection denied to his grandson. But with the multi- 
tude, the crowd in the street, the frequenters of Unter 
den Linden, the Emperor has always been regarded as a 
demi-god, as the most glorious man of his age, the pro- 
moter and inspirer of the modern German spirit, which 
he indeed epitomizes to a great extent, although he does 
not always see eye to eye with his people. 



CONCLUSION 293 

With regard to the Emperor's views on religion, they 
are, as far as I could gather, expressed in his public 
speeches. He conforms outwardly to the prescribed 
forms of the Lutheran Church, and deplores the infi- 
delity of the German nation, chiefly because he believes 
that it undermines the monarchical principle. 

Sometimes, after supper, while the Empress and her 
ladies were working, and the gentlemen discussed the 
glasses of beer or orange- juice which were handed round 
with the tea, the Emperor would read aloud to us. One 
of those readings was a sermon taken from an English 
book, a collection called "Conversations with Christ," 
and this particular religious essay discussed in a very 
interesting and scholarly manner the character and 
temperament of Pilate. The Emperor interpolated his 
reading with remarks on the analogy, pointed out indeed 
by the writer, between the Roman Governor of Judaea 
and a District Magistrate in India, and of the parallel 
difficulty of their respective positions among a people 
of alien customs and religions. 

It appeared to me that the Emperor's ideas of our 
Indian officials were hardly fair to them. He seemed 
to think that the hard-working servants of our Eastern 
Empire were the same as those of the days of Warren 
Hastings and the East India Company, that they went 
to India chiefly to enrich themselves at the expense of the 
natives, and received large presents and bribes from the 
native princes. 

There was no opportunity for me to combat these 



294 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 

erroneous ideas of the Emperor, but the next day I 
attacked one of his suite, and told him that there was a 
very strict rule governing Indian civil servants, which 
forbade any official to accept any presents whatever 
from ruling princes. 

" They may only take flowers and a few sweetmeats, 
all other presents are invariably returned when offered," 
I told him ; but though he accepted my information with 
polite interest, I could see that it left room for much 
doubt in his mind as to the integrity of British rule in 
India. 

I often had occasion to find the Emperor woefully 
misinformed on many subjects with regard to our British 
possessions. His knowledge was often antiquated and 
out of date, which in such a very up-to-date monarch 
was rather surprising. 

However, he was extraordinarily pleased with the book 
of sermons, and insisted on reading them, in season and 
out of season, to his adjutants and also to a great many 
of the clergy of the Lutheran Church, to whom he recom- 
mended them as oratorical models ; but it is not given to 
every one to be able to fight in Saul's armour, and, as few 
of the German clergy have progressed far in English, the 
suggestion fell on somewhat barren ground. 

Evening after evening the Emperor would dip into 
his sermon-book, reading out paragraphs in his thick, 
harsh, nasal, rather indistinct voice. One among them 
ran as follows : 

" The Present is not and cannot stand alone ; it is 



CONCLUSION 295 

indissolubly connected with the Past and the Future. 
History alone has the true perspective by which to judge 
what is relatively great or little, what is of vital moment 
and what is of no consequence. That which we have 
regarded as trifling, history may dignify as of supreme 
importance ; that which we have thought great, may 
turn out to be infinitesimal. Our only safety lies in giv- 
ing heed to that which is permanent and unchanging, 
the moral quality of our deeds ; . . . truth is not tem- 
porary, but eternal ; right is not the expedient, but the 
just." 



INDEX 



Adalbert, Prince of Prussia, 133 

Acacia trees, 209 

" Achilleion," 225 

Adlon, Hotel, 214 

Adolf, Princess, of Schaumburg- 
Lippe, 237 

Africa, South-West, 103 

Albany, Duchess of, 213 

Alexander, Prince of Greece, 234 

Alexander, Princess of Teck, 213 

Alexandra, Queen, 272 

"Alexandria," the Emperor's river- 
steamer, 136 

Alsace-Lorraine, 33, 34 

Arrogance, military, 67 

August Wilhelm, Prince of Prussia, 
215 

Augusta-Stift, 96, 98 

Augusta, Victoria, Empress, 5 

Aus-steuer, 87 

Automobiles, 131 

Babelsburg, Schloss, 211 
Bade-Ort, 119 
Bahn-Steig decorations, 255 
Bayreuth, Wilhelmina of, 182 
Bedrooms, German, 19 
Berlin, 198 ; social life of, 203 
Bernhardi, 50 
Birthdays, 232 
Boys, German, 82 
Brockdorff, Countess, 161 
Brunswick, Duchess of, 31, 127 
Biilow, Prince, 158, 271 
Bursche, 125 
Butter- Brodcken, 23 
20 



Cadet-schools, 98 

Cadinen, 279 

Caligula, 257 

Carlyle, 64, 65, 155, 174 

Cassel, 229 

Cathedral, Berlin, 199 

Charlottenburger-Chaussee, 198 

Children, German, 24 

Church, Garrison, 63 

Clothes, civilian, 67, 73 

Coaches, 75 

Colonies, German, 103 

Commis-Brod, 211 

Constantine, King of Greece, 234 

Cook, Japanese, 253 

Corcyra, 285 

Corfu, 225, 285 

Court, Prussian, 125 

Crayfish, freshwater, 257 

Croquet, 55 

Czar of Russia, 283 

" Daily Telegraph," 145, 156 
Decorations, Russian fondness] for, 

256 
Deputation of Englishmen, 267 
Dernburg, 25 
Dickens, 75 
Disarmament, 33 
Donkeys, 60 

Drawing-rooms, German, 115 
Dreadnoughts, 247, 251 
Dressing-gowns, 190 

Educational system, German, "iol 
Edward VII, King, 269, 273 



298 MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 



Ehrenbreitstein, 151 
Einlass-Karte, 199 
Einquartierutig, 61, 73 
Elsass-Lbthringen, 71 
Englishmen in Germany, 262 
Ernest, of Cumberland, 5, 282 

Fink von Finkenstein, Count, 73 

Fireplaces, German, 114 

Flowers, exhibition of, 225 

Football, 55 

Footmen, Court, 42 

Forest, Black, 14 

France, 193 

Franz Ferdinand of Austria, 289 

Frederick the Great, of Prussia, 43, 

63, 174, 182 
Frederick William I, of Prussia, 64, 

175 
Frederick William II, of Prussia, 

213 
French culture, 81 ; governess, 192 ; 

soldiers, 80 
Fritz, Prince, 213 
Furniture, 229 

Gardens, 219 
Garten-Restaurants, 81 
Garter, Bride's, 286 
George V, King of England, 283 
George, Prince of Greece, 193 
Germany and France, 193 
Gesang- Verein, 1 1 
Girls, German, 82 
Goose-step, 43 
Greece, King of, 235 
Grenadiers, 259 

Haldane, Lord, 277 
Harden, Maximilian, 41 
Hatred of French, 191 
Havel, 135, 141, 211 
Heiligen See, 211 
Helene, Princess of Greece, 234 
Henry, Prince and Princess, of 
Prussia, 238 



Hesse, Prince Max of, 44, 236 
Hesse- Darmstadt, Princess Louise of, 

213 
Hohenburg, Duchess of, 289 
" Hohenzollern," yacht, 144 
Housekeeping, 124 
House laws of Hohenzollern family, 

187 
Husbands, German, 123 

Ireland, 34 

Ingenheim, Countess von, 213 ; villa, 

212 
Inspectors, school, 100 

Japanese espionage, 253 
Jerome, King of Westphalia, 229 
Joachim, Prince of Prussia, 217, 273 

Kadetten-Schulen, 98 
Kalb-Schnitzel, 11 
Kalte Pracht, 115 
Kaserne, Augusta Victoria, 59 
Keith, 210 
Kiel, 248 

Konigs-Wusterhausen, 182 
Korner, 89 

Landsturm, 58 

Language, English, 99 ; French, 99, 

109, no 
Letters, soldiers', 39, 49 
Levee, 204 
Liegnitz, Princess of, 213 ; villa, 212, 

215 

Life-Guards, Prussian, 67, 210 

Lindstedt, 217 

Lorelei, 27 

Louise, Queen of Prussia, 142, 173 

Lust-Garten, 64 

Mackensen, Lieutenant von, 74 

Manover, Kaiser-, 62 

Marble Palace, 211 

Margaret, Princess of Hesse, 235 

Marriages, German, 84 



INDEX 



299 



Mary, Queen of England, 283 
Max, Prince of Hesse, 44, 236, 283 
Militarism, 32 
Mirbach, Baron von, 160 

Napoleon I, 173 
Navy, German, 141, 244 
Navy-League, 245 
New Palace, 208 
"November Storm," 147 

Officers, German, 59, 74 

d'Olbreuse, Elinor, 163 

Old English Masters, exhibition of, 

207 
Oldenburg, Princess of, 213 
Oskar, Prince of Prussia, 273 

Paintings of Frederick William I, 

184 
Parade- Schritt, 43 
Paterson, Miss, 229 
Patriotism, German, 48 
Pfanne- Kuchen, 9 
Pfauen-Insel, 142 
Picket- Haube, 69 
Picnics, 138 

Pictures, military, 44, 49 
Post-cards, picture-, 39 
Potsdam, 32, 63, 208 

Recruits, German, 49 

Reit-Wege, 198 

Rhine, 18, 25 

Roberts, Lord, 275 

Rococo, 210 

Rominten, 252, 255 

" Royal Louise," ship, 140 

Russo-Japanese War, 253, 254 

Rutsch-Bahn, 231 

Sans Souci, ^2, 208 
Sattel-Meister, 68 
Sausages, 105 
Scharnhorst, 173 
Schleswig-Holstein, Princess of, 215 



Schloss, Berlin, 43 

Schools, State girls', 91 

Schule, Victoria-Louisen-, 99 

Sentiment, German, 3, 28 

Sentry, 53 

Service, military, 50 

Seydlitz, 210 

Socialists, 172 

Soldiers, 47, 51 

Stadt-Schloss, 211 

Steamer, Rhine, 25 

Stein, 173 

Stift, Augusta-, 96 

Stoves, 114 

Suicides of children, 102 

Sunday, English, 75 

Tax of honour, 32 
Teachers, women, 87, 91 
Tier-Garten, 197, 203 
Tier-Schutz- Verein, 205 
Tirpitz, Admiral von, 246 
Troika, Russian, 256 
Tugend- Bund, 173 
Tutors, German, 92 

Uhlans, 55 

Uniform, officers in, 67 

Urville, 71 

Vaterlandsliebe, 45 

Victoria Louise, Princess of Prussia, 
1 ; birthdays, 232 ; call at Villa 
Liegnitz, 216 ; stay at Lindstedt, 
218 ; organ-grinding for Navy- 
League, 244 ; views pn German 
Fleet, 249 ; and on Russo-Japanese 
War, 254 

Victoria, Queen of England, 149, 163 

Villa Alexander, 217 

Vogelweide, Walter von der, 89 

Voltaire, 210 

Voss, Julie von, 213 

Wald- Restaurant, 10 
War of Liberation, 173 



3 oo MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND 



Wedding of the Kaiser's daughter, 282 

Welsh coal, 249 

Werner, Anton von, 44 

White Hall, Berlin, 283 

Wilhelmina of Bayreuth, 182 

Wilhelmshohe, 228 

William I, Emperor, statue of, 1 99 ; 
devoted servants, 292 

William II, German Emperor, his 
adjutants, 144 ; anecdote of hedge- 
hog, 133 ; anger with gardener, 226 ; 
audiences, 145 ; appearance, 150 ; 
charm of manner, 149 ; criticisms 
at manoeuvres, 167 ; depression at 
"November Storm," 146 ; English 
tastes, 165 ; horses, 200 ; inter- 



views, 153; journeys, 143; love 
of English country life, 166 ; man- 
ners, 149 ; military upbringing, 
291 ; morning greeting to soldiers, 
260 ; musical activities, 164 ; per- 
sonal share in war, 290 ; rides in 
Berlin, 200 ; remarks on Afghan- 
istan, 238 ; on grenadiers, 259 ; 
religious views, 293 ; scorn of 
British attaches, 276; self-con- 
fidence, 152 ; sermons, 294 

Wiirtemberg, King of, 229 

Wystidten, 267 

Zeppelin, 240, 243 
Zieten, 210 



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